


The King of the Long Night

by bronson



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, wish fulfillment via choice pickings of several fan theories whoops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-05 19:30:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4192158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bronson/pseuds/bronson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stannis of the House Baratheon, First of his Name, writ in history as the King of the Long Night. His reign in conversations with five people: Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister, Davos Seaworth, Edric Storm, and Shireen Baratheon.</p><p>Check end notes for the prophecies/fan theories used in this fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Daenerys Targaryen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/gifts), [dubbledore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dubbledore/gifts), [shadowsfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowsfan/gifts), [theoldgods (missandei)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=theoldgods+%28missandei%29), [quentinknockout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quentinknockout/gifts), [starsunk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsunk/gifts).



**(301 AC)**

 

Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the last of her house, and Stannis of the House Baratheon, the last of his, had entered the throne room of the Red Keep together as Drogon flew high above King's Landing and the banners that flew for one side or the other in the Rebellion waged by their respective brothers dipped low to the ground, declaring for neither. Declaring for both.

The War for Westeros, or so the last stand against the Others was now being called in the maesters' books, ended in victory and thousands of lost lives. King's Landing was rid of Lannisters _because_ of Lannisters, the Kingslayer captured in the Red Keep, unresisting where he knelt by the bed that bore Queen Cersei's corpse.

The bones of their remaining children separated by leagues of bloodshed between them. Myrcella deep in the Dornish Marches, accidentally killed in a skirmish that meant to secret her away from Doran Martell's clout. Tommen the Boy-King along the Goldroad; swarmed by the angry smallfolk--that only months before witnessed the shame of his mother--in his flight to Casterly Rock after the death of Kevan Lannister woke the so-feared rats in the walls of the Red Keep. 

Dragon and stag alike kept the Iron Throne empty for nearly a fortnight as they rested and shook the winter cold from their bones.

The liberation of the North had freed ten thousand swords to Stannis' command, equipped with dragonglass swords and arrows smithed at White Harbor, the ores farmed from the belly of Dragonstone. They fought Winter for a month and a day, aswarm with impossible odds as the Wall fell to the Other and the war came to Brandon's Gift.

Even as they stood their ground, the Long Night threatened to engulf them all, and the cold had seeped deeper and deeper south. Until a brief break from winter and the undead saw the wings of a dragon as black and as large as Balerion himself breathed fire upon their enemies.

The legendary Great Other was not found among the burning corpses but mayhap they just didn't know what to look for. The wights carried the faces of their loved ones. The Others the frozen skull-masks of death, all of them looking as similarly gaunt and haunted as the next that if one were the Great Other then all of them must be the Great Other.

The Long Night clutched the North to its bosom, and all of the North's sons and daughters struggled to piece their lives back together in the shadow of the thickest winter they had ever faced.

Yet no one knew if the worst was over, or if they'd only weathered through the first gust of the cold winds. As Drogon burned the corpses, Stannis' men flushed the Wall free of its enemies. Daenerys didn't dare wander so close to it, afraid that dragonfire would destroy the Wall completely.

The war among men was over, but the war against winter was only beginning. They have survived each other, but they had yet to survive destruction. It was with this chilling notion that Baratheon and Targaryen descended from the North to retake the Iron Throne, only to seize it easily, bloodlessly. A hollow gasp of victory at the end of all things.

"I would call you a traitor, a _usurper_ ," Daenerys said, as they sat across from each other in the council room. "But I don't know the laws of Westeros well. Mayhap I'm wrong." She met his eyes. "Am I?" It was not a question, but a challenge.

They met alone, Drogon perched upon the ruins of the Dragonpit. Stannis' soldiers camped outside the walls, save for Davos Seaworth who remained at Winterfell, reluctant to leave the boy Rickon Stark until Winterfell was once again whole.

Stannis watched her, this queen, or khaleesi, or whatever she called herself. The Last Dragon, truly, wresting that title from her brother Rhaegar. Rhaegar had no dragons.

"I would call you usurper as well," Stannis replied. "After my brother took the Iron Throne--"

"From my father," Daenerys pointed out, her voice sharp.

Stannis nodded. "From your father, by right of conquest, the crown passed to House Baratheon and I am its rightful heir."

Daenerys' lips thinned. "Its only heir," she said, but not unkindly much to Stannis' surprise. Her gaze grew sad as a quiet swayed between them. "As much as I am the only heir to House Targaryen."

" _We_ ," Stannis corrected.

Daenerys frowned in confusion

"My grandmother was a Targaryen," Stannis replied, surprised that Daenerys did not know this _._ "Rhaelle, her name was. Daughter of King Aegon V." It felt odd saying so, his claim to the Targaryen name that echoed the very words of Oldtown during the prelude of Robert’s secession from the Mad King. Stannis had always been a Baratheon, never a Targaryen. Aerys was _king_ , not kin, and if the Lord Steffon ever called him cousin he did so with the weight of formality, not unkindly but not with warmth either. Even as Stannis had vague recollection of Aerys embracing Steffon with his gaunt arms and the talons of his unclipped nails, during the tourney that marked Renly’s birth. Aerys called him _cousin_ as though that was everything that Steffon was and not Lord of Storm’s End.

All of a sudden, Daenerys laughed. Laughed, and laughed, a deep tremor from her belly. Her laughter filled the council room, echoing in the darker corners of the hall where only years ago it had been full of Renly's.

Stannis cringed; he mistrusted laughter but the sound was not unpleasant, and it had been a while since he last heard genuine delight. He waited for it to pass.

"I didn't know that we're cousins," Daenerys said after a while, a smile lingering on her lips. "If we hadn't lost so much for all the good our kinship did for us, I would laugh for years and years until they come to know me as the Dragon Who Laughed."

"I fail to see the jape, my lady," Stannis said, annoyed.

"My brother Viserys spat on the name of your brother and your House as though you were born of The Stranger himself. Yet you are a dragon as well. We ran from your brother's hired swords all our lives," Daenerys continued, her smile gone. She did not grow angry, but the light seemed to have winked out of her violet eyes. "In the end, it was a dragon that chased us to the ends of the earth. Not The Stranger's own heir."

"Robert was not a god, but in his youth many thought him godly," Stannis said. "He was beloved, as much as your own brother had been."

"Viserys was not beloved," Daenerys corrected him.

Stannis shook his head. "I refer to Rhaegar. The Last Dragon, until you came along, my lady."

"We fly in the shadow of our godly brothers, then, you and I. Brothers who left us a war to finish," Daenerys mused. "And I'm no lady."

"As I am no lord. I am the rightful King of the Seven Kingdoms," Stannis said, and the fragile peace between them shook at the cracks webbing the thin ice of courtesy they had mustered longer than expected.

"And I am the Mother of Dragons," Daenerys retorted. "I've been many things, Lord Stannis--a khaleesi to the largest _khalasar_ that roamed the Dothraki Sea, the Queen of Meereen, _mhysa_ to my children in the Free Cities--all of these just as much as I am the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms."

Stannis pursed his lips, his hands tightening on the arm rests of his chair. The very same chair that would have been his had Robert named him Hand of the King instead of Eddard Stark. "You think to usurp me? Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, usurper of a usurper."

"One word, my lord of Baratheon, and Drogon will take wing and torch your entire army in their sleep," Daenerys said, a statement of fact more so than a threat.

Stannis held his tongue. She had the truth of it. He was helpless to stop such a power. He could not slay a dragon, and even if he had a naked blade in his hand he was not so brutal as to strike down Daenerys Targaryen where she sat.

"We can marry and rule as king and queen, unite our houses as our forebears once did. There will be peace in this realm," Daenerys said.

It was not a suggestion, spoken as it was with the exhausted wisdom of someone who had married and remarried as need dictated.

_I have a wife_ , Stannis was prepared to say. A wife he left at Winterfell to nurse the frostbite that claimed her toes in the icy cells of Castle Black as her guards were slain in the courtyard during the mutiny of the Night's Watch that struck down its Lord Commander.

Jon Snow, breathed back to life by Melisandre herself, who stood beside his wolf at the frontlines of battle against the Others when, by all the laws of gods and men, he should have already been a corpse, his life's blood spilling from the wounds that marred his body.

Jon Snow, who gasped back into life in the godswood outside the Wall, as Selyse pleaded for her daughter's life and watched as she burned for the name of yet another god.

Stannis could never forget his wife's crazed screams when she clutched at his cloak with frozen fingers. _She saved him_ , she'd said, her shrewd eyes glazed over in the fever dreams of Shireen's death. _She saved him and not our daughter._

He shuddered as the memory rattled the noxious, unrelenting grief in his throat.

“But I’m already wed to another," Daenerys continued after a while. She eyed him, her gaze aged beyond her years. "I thought I was coming home, when I flew across the Narrow Sea. I returned to Dragonstone but found nobody there. A garrison-- _yours_ , so they say. They quivered at the sight of Drogon perched where the Stone Dragons have stood watch for hundreds of years."

Stannis knew the tale. It was as though Aegon the Conqueror had come again, his men had said.

"Dragonstone's doors are not red," Daenerys said, with a deep sadness Stannis didn't understand. "From the tales Viserys told me, I expected a grand keep that would feel welcoming for anyone that bore blood of the dragon, however much they've strayed from home."

Stannis watched as tears swam in her eyes. She let them fall on her cheeks with the stubborn dignity of someone who'd suffered too much to be afraid of pain.

"But Dragonstone is not my home. Its doors are carved from black stone. Drogon feels the dragonfire that once molded them from molten rock, but I do not." She wiped her cheeks and took a deep breath. "This is not my home, Lord Stannis."

Resolve stilled the shiver of stifled sobs in her throat. "If I look back, I'm lost," Daenerys said, more to herself than Stannis, yet her gaze locked with his. "I've come so far, but I feel as lost as ever. I return from the brink of ruin but return to _where_ , I don't know."

Stannis doesn't either, and not for the first time he sat in silence in the presence of this Targaryen, this Aegon the Conqueror that claimed no lands, and killed no living man for the name of her House, who saved the realm rather than brought it to heel.

He felt a deep, resounding respect for her. "If you take the throne, I will not bend the knee," Stannis said. "The throne is mine by right, ever since the dragon bowed to the stag on the Trident, but I'm tired of war, and so is the realm."

It was Daenerys' turn to listen, and she did so bracing for the worst.

"If I call my banners, I know that barely half of them will fight against a Targaryen. I took Dragonstone in Robert's name even as your father's allies surrounded me. Velaryon, Bar Emmon, Sunglass," his lips twisted. "I was Lord of Dragonstone for almost fifteen years, but they never loved me. But even if they did and fought in my name instead of Targaryen, I know that I will be defeated."

Stannis spoke emotionlessly, with the steady beat of rationality as the only source of strength in his words. He spoke as though hollow, and he was; a king made cold by winter, made hollow at the thaw of war's end.

He had spent many years fighting a war that ended with this; he had fought his own brother, fought the Boltons, fought the Others. He had lost his own heir and, with her, the hope of continuing the Baratheon name through his line. He was tired of fighting, he who was hailed unbending, stubborn and defiant. He will be unbending to the last.

"I will take the black," Stannis said, "If you could spare House Baratheon this small mercy."

Daenerys frowned. "But the Others have been vanquished."

Stannis nodded. "For now. The Great Other still roams free, if such a thing truly exists, and the Long Night is upon us, or so the maesters at Oldtown proclaim. I will do my duty to the realm, even if the throne eludes me yet again."

Daenerys mustered a smile. "Yet again."

Stannis grimaced. "I curse the day Robert ever thought to rebel. If he hadn't, then the crown would not have fallen on me. I curse Cersei Lannister, for not begetting trueborn Baratheons to take up the crown after my brother. I curse many things, but the gods no longer listen to me, as I have not listened to them."

"We can only live with what we have been given," Daenerys agreed.

"Indeed, my lady." _Your Grace_ , Stannis knew he should have said. But the sting of defeat was still sharp, and he couldn't bring himself to say it just yet.

"I thank you for honor," Daenerys said, "but I'm afraid I must prove you wrong. Yet again."

Stannis' frown deepened in surprise.

"This is not my home, my lord," Daenerys sighed. "And I too am tired. Tired of living in places where I am not welcome."

"You are not without allies," Stannis sighed. He loathed to admit the truth but he could never truly hide from it. "The Crownlands--"

Daenerys held up a hand, and Stannis fell silent, albeit bristling at the interruption.

"I have made Meereen mine," Daenerys continued. "And there I will stay and rule as a proper queen should."

Stannis sat uncomprehending.

"We can only live with what we have been given," Daenerys said again. "I was given Meereen and I will finish what I started there." She smiled. "The Iron Throne is yours."

_By right_ , Stannis thought on instinct, only to shake his head when he realized that that wasn't the case anymore.

"Do your duty, my lord, and I will do mine." She rose, the heavy chair scratching on stone. The very same chair once sat by Robert and the Targaryen kings and pretenders that once sat across from their Hands in the three hundred years of their rule over the Seven Kingdoms.

"But never forget that dragons fly in the east," she said, a threat wrapped in farewell. _And dragons will never fear to cross the Narrow Sea._


	2. Tyrion Lannister

**(301 AC)**

 

"I ought to have struck down your entire House for all the good you did mine," was the first words that the new king of the Seven Kingdoms ever uttered to Tyrion Lannister.

He was sat in his solar, surrounded by two of the newly minted Kingsguard that rose alongside their king as he ascended the Iron Throne after years of war: Rolland Storm at his right and at his left, the Lord Hand's own son Devan Seaworth, green boys both. _Green boys that have faced winter and Others both_. Outside, Ser Richard Horpe stood alone. Of the seven knights required of the Kingsguard, two were yet to be appointed--a promise as much as a reminder from the king, that he knew the cost of loyalty and if he was capable of trust then he trusted only those who had been with him from the start.

"Treason," Tyrion pointed out, "depends on who's in power. You supported your own brother in his _treasonous_ rebellion against the Mad King. I never bet against my family." _Up to a point, T_ yrion thought to himself. __And, at some point, you didn't either,__ went unsaid, the wordless implication of Renly's mysterious death during the War of the Five Kings stretched taut between them.

Stannis' teeth grit so hard Tyrion feared he might break his own jaw. "I endured the Siege of Storm's End to weather the king's justice. If I had been captured then I, too, would have faced the wrath of Aerys Targaryen. I knew the cost, and so do you."

Tyrion raised his eyebrows. "Yet you fault _me_ for _weathering_ your _king's justice_? I commit the same treason you did. Mayhap if I wait a bit longer, some other lord will sit the throne--some other lord whose _justice_ I have not offended."

"Then what a misfortune for House Lannister that I am in power now and you are not," Stannis replied, appearing unfazed by Tyrion's cheek, yet taut with anger all the same. "You have many cousins, do you not? Lannisport is teeming with Stafford Lannister's brood. I can strike you down and raise any one of them as Lord of Casterly Rock."

Ser Daven Lannister, son and heir of his father Stafford, lay in wait. He was not quite as ambitious as the best of lions but Stannis spared him from a march to the Night's Watch for the purpose of having a looming shadow of another Lannister at the foot of Casterly Rock. Still, he did not wait in safety; his sisters were arranged to marry Dornish lordlings, forced to choose between the weightless names in Dorne and the wildling chieftains that marched with Stannis' host to Winterfell, of which many were clamoring for southron wives for better footholds in their new lands along Brandon's Gift.

Tyrion laughed. "I didn't take you for your brothers, _Lord_ Stannis." Stannis grit his teeth."They may be lesser Lannisters but they're still Lannisters. They are loyal to the Rock first before the throne." _Unless the throne is also held by a Lannister, but that opportunity has been squandered._

"I don't ask for the loyalty of Lannisters," Stannis said. _Lannister_ wasacid on his tongue. "Only that they bend the knee and swear fealty to my rightful claim."

Tyrion sat unmoving. "My legs are too stout for bending knees." Tywin Lannister wouldn't allow such an affront, but it was the Imp that sat there. Tywin Lannister was no more.

"Then you're useless to me," Stannis said bluntly. "Your brother I've sent to the Wall when he asked for death after he killed your sister. But my kingdom has bled enough, and I am not without mercy."

"What, no burnings?" Tyrion parried, watching as the barb hit home.

Stannis' infamous preference for burnings to exact punishment from doomed lawbreakers stopped abruptly because of what happened at the Wall. An event so mired in confusion and absurdity that Tyrion had been torn between laughter and sympathy. _Stannis_ _’_ _heir is dead_ , he’d heard tell. _Burned at the stake by the crazed fool Patchface_.

For a moment, Stannis didn't speak. Anger was writ plainly on his face and Tyrion wondered if he had gone too far. He sat unnervingly still, as though every draw of breath was a pain he had to live with. A cough bubbled low in his throat. Tyrion watched as even now the king fought with great pride despite the sudden dull cast to his skin, the bloodlessness of his lips.

 _Keel over dead,_ Tyrion almost prayed. _And save us both the trouble._ But the king did no such thing until his breath evened out and color returned to his cheeks.

From the corners of his eyes, he noticed the stirrings of the Kingsguard. Ser Devan's hand had flown to the handle of his sword, as though anxious to lop off Tyrion's head where he sat at Stannis' command.

When Stannis spoke, his voice was thick with emotion--whether it was anger or guilt or a sordid mix of the two, Tyrion didn't know and didn't particularly care. He may not hold the power in the room but he was not completely without weapons.

"You will not mock me," Stannis said. His words were mangled at the edges with rage. _Ours is the fury_ were the Baratheon words. Stannis, heirless and alone, could now claim all the fury for himself. "If you think to play a mindless game then I will bring you to the Wall myself, in chains or in parts if need be. Mayhap you would meet whatever bastardy of Lannister justice your brother might claim in the name of Tywin Lannister."

"It's a long way between here and the Wall. Who knows whose sword he might find to conveniently fall into, in his grief." It sounded like a jape but Tyrion was not entirely without heart. "Perhaps you will have saved me then, in the end."

Hatred against his family may have taken root during his exile but Tyrion had always loved his brother Jaime, and perhaps it was the memory of that love that dampened his humor. He was, at the very last, alone.

Wars struck down the best--the anointed knights, the honorable lords and ladies of great houses—and the innocents—firstborns and infant heirs at the breast. This war in particular took an entire family from House Baratheon; an entire legacy from House Lannister. At the very last, two scions of dwindling, dying Houses sat now across from each other, playing a game of wills with no one left to benefit from their victory.

"Mayhap you will be the very last person I burn for treason," Stannis spat. Both of his knights braced for the command. It never came.

 _Ah, you do need me after all._ "It will be a quick roast, surely," Tyrion smiled, gesturing at his small body. "But I came here to seek your mercy. Not your ire."

"Then you’re doing a terrible job of it," Stannis said. The frayed edges of rage in his voice ironed out into the biting steel of a king who didn't hesitate to swing the sword.

 _Then gods be good, we will never play games at all_ , Tyrion lamented mockingly. But he kept his tongue and instead nodded deeply, almost reverently, resisting the urge to smile when Stannis seemed more annoyed than gratified by Tyrion's display.

Finally, Stannis waved a brisk hand at his knights. They eased but only slightly. Ser Devan's young face was still flushed red with anger underneath his white helm.

"If your brother dies, then he dies, by his own luckless hand or somebody else's," Stannis dismissed. "But the Wall must needs be replenished with swords, and I have choice pickings over treasonous knights and highborns. What they choose to do on the way there is none of my concern."

Earlier that day, Tyrion saw for himself the exodus of liveried knights stripped bare of their mantles and banners, mounted for the long journey on the Kingsroad. Among them he saw Young Griff-- _Aegon the Pretender_ , the crowds hollered as he rode through the gates--his cause rendered futile after the death of Jon Connington, the vast host he brought across the Narrow Sea plagued with greyscale pushed to the shore until they fled back to whatever corner of the Free Cities they hailed from; the disfigured Loras Tyrell, stripped of his Kingsguard armor, as ugly as he was handsome a lifetime ago; Victarion Greyjoy, brought kicking and screaming from Pyke, to the pleasure of Asha Greyjoy; the Kettleblacks, the Kingsguard Ormund among them; nearly a hundred mounted knights and retainers besides, a steady stream of those condemned to a lifetime of dishonor in exchange for the survival of their names and holdfasts to the family they left behind.

The Great Harvest it would be called in later years—a ghastly affair and Tyrion had waited for the destruction of this king when ravens bearing his commands flew across the realm. All houses were to pledge swords to the Night's Watch--a tall order in and of itself but Stannis had not stopped there.

The Great Houses that had defied him would send their younger sons to the Wall as well. If they lacked for younger sons, then they would send children--wards to the Houses that had been loyal to the crowned stag. If they lacked for children still, they were to send twice as many swords and the added burden of parting with good mounts. All in an attempt to replenish the castles along the Wall.

In that, Stannis had been successful. When Tyrion last ventured so far north, he knew that the Wall was dire need of help. The surge of support now from King's Landing would have seen each and every ruined castle restored to some semblance of strength. The thieves and rapers that made up their numbers overwhelmed by the highborns that took the black.

He remembered the news of Randyll Tarly, robbed of his younger son--robbed of a _male heir_ because his eldest was now lost to him in Oldtown. Dickon Tarly had reached the Wall in guise of compliance, made his vows as expected of him. All the while, Lord Tarly planned for his escape. The boy dared to desert the Watch along with the fifty retainers he brought with him. Tyrion heard tell of a new mutiny brewing at the Wall. Dickon Tarly and the aggrieved highborns, rising up against the Night's Watch to return to their homes.

Tyrion had wondered if Jaime had been one of them, but of his brother he heard nothing.

The mutiny was doomed from the start. Jon Snow, newly restored as the Lord Commander, had been well prepared. Whispers spoke of Lady Melisandre's fires and the brewing rebellion she saw there even before Dickon conspired it.

Dickon Tarly did not get far. He was struck down in the snow by the wildlings along Brandon's Gift and the loyal brothers of the Night's Watch at the newly replenished castles of Torches and Greensguard. The ship that awaited him at Eastwatch was burned at anchor and Randyll Tarly was robbed at the last.

And what was left of Stannis Baratheon's Seven Kingdoms?

The child Robert Arryn, the Warden of the East; the child Rickon Stark, the Warden of the North, with the Lady Sansa--their marriage writ out of existence by Stannis' small council; Edmure Tully, Lord of Riverrun; the young Arianne Martell, Princess of Dorne; the headstrong Asha Greyjoy, Lady of the Iron Islands in the absence and exile of her uncle Euron Greyjoy; the lame Willas Tyrell, who dared to defy his own father to broker an allegiance with the king they once defeated.

Many holdfasts remained empty, old seats of even older families now ripe for the taking at Stannis' own pleasure. Casterly Rock held by Tyrion's recently widowed aunt Genna; Dragonstone and Storm's End by lordling castellans; the Dreadfort flushed free of the flayed man after Roose Bolton was killed at the Battle of Ice and his bastard Ramsay burned by Stannis’ men in the name of R’hllor—the last burning Stannis ever allowed, or so the birds whispered.

 _What a war this turned out to be_ , Tyrion thought, _the dust has settled over the heads of children, green boys, and imps._

But there were blades of grass smart enough to dodge the scythe. Of Dorne there were but very few highborns plucked from their homes, when Princess Arianne answered the call of the front lines with Martell spears in exchange for a king’s recognition of her birthright. A gamble that she had won, sitting as she was now as Princess of Sunspear with her father shipped to the last Targaryen he’d sought to honor a marriage pact formed lifetimes ago. After them followed others: House Arryn of the Vale, after an Alayne Stone confessed Littlefinger’s murder of Lysa Arryn and the conspiracy that felled the former Hand of the King; the sibling apples of House Fossoway turned its back on King’s Landing after the murder of Kevan Lannister; House Blackwood, at the urging of the Blackfish in exchange for half the lands and incomes of House Bracken—clutched to the Lannisters till the last—were promised to Raventree. Not a long list of allies before the winder winds had been kept at bay--all the better for the Night's Watch now, as Stannis exacted his payment. All the worse for the rest.

At the end of it all, the Seven Kingdoms found itself at the start of a new age, and Tyrion was loathe to be left behind.

"What have you decided? I would sooner have you in chains than waste hours on your games," Stannis pressed, this king who didn't care for the pleasure of others.

At last, Tyrion shrugged, treating the semblance of mercy bestowed upon him as though it was a trifle of a thing. "I will be your Lord of Lannister."

"You will the keep the peace in the west," Stannis asserted, his cold blue eyes boring into Tyrion's. "Or I will call upon your cousins. I don't care if Lannisters spill Lannister blood."

Tywin Lannister once brought ruin upon House Reyne for their insolence, upon House Darklyn for their treason against the Mad King, and for a brief moment Tyrion wondered if he could fill his father's shoes after all. Cleanse Lannisport of his rival claimants to Casterly Rock and have the Lannister name die with him. However, was Tyrion the Imp, not Tywin the Great Lion, and it was better to surround himself with family rather than Baratheon loyalists, however much he cared for neither.

"To keep the peace," Tyrion smiled, and left the king's solar as Lord of Casterly Rock, Shield of Lannisport, and Warden of the West.


	3. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Halved the Davos chapter because it, uh, ran away from me.

**(302 AC)**

 

The ride south to King’s Landing was a terrible affair of snow and even more snow, a never-ending blankness of pure white in the month-long ride down the kingsroad. As the Long Night stretched far across the Seven Kingdoms, the winter took hold of the land unlike Davos had witnessed in the handful of winters of his life. None were as cold as this one; none started so bloodily and so terribly.

But Davos travelled with northern lords, near two hundred mounted knights and near five hundred retainers and free riders besides. Northerners loved only the north, it was said, but Davos hazarded a guess that some of them might be thankful for the reprieve of slightly warmer climes of the south.

 _You’ll return won’t you, Davos?_ Rickon Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, a boy of seven dressed to his ears in the thick furs his sister Sansa had insisted upon. They stood at the courtyard as Davos and the northern host departed from Winterfell. The boy had ached to clutch at Davos’ hand, but he was a lord now and lords did not quiver.

 _No one ever returns when they leave Winterfell,_ said Rickon.  _That’s not true_ , he’d said, kneeling in the snow to look the boy in the eye.  _Your sister came back, didn’t she?_ A pittance of comfort, he knew, but he took a care to utter them sincerely, glancing at Lady Sansa where she stood at Rickon’s left.  _And Shaggydog won’t ever leave you, will he?_ The direwolf huffed a cloud of mist through his snout from where he sat at Rickon’s right.

Rickon, the Wild Pup, as he was fondly called by his liege lords—to the boy’s great annoyance—was not so wild and willful when adults took the time to speak  _with_  him rather than  _to_  him. Davos learned that the hard way, when he first found the boy—besmirched in grime and freedom in the island of Skagos.  _I’m the Hand, little lord. My place is with the king,_ Davos told him. It had done little to ease the boy’s worries; Eddard Stark, after all, left Winterfell a Hand and returned as bones.

The hardened earth of the kingsroad ended leagues away from King’s Landing. The turrets of the city walls beyond the rolling hills that surrounded it hidden beyond the rolling hills surrounding the city. The kingsroad seemed to end where the camps began, and thousands of soldiers littered much of the surrounding lands, their camps assembled in a vast array of banners and colors snapping in the cold wind.

Behind him flew many more banners. Karstark, Umber, Manderly, with the Stark direwolf come to King's Landing once again, flying high above the standards of its vassal houses.

Surrounding them were plenty more banners, astride each other in the dull gray sky. A woven canopy of various loyalties under which were the hosts and pavilions that had spilled forth from the walls of King’s Landing.

Snow did not fall on the ground here, Davos noticed, or if it did then it was easily trampled and melted by the hundreds upon hundreds of braziers that warmed the spaces in between the tents, and the thousands upon thousands of armored feet that trudged to and fro. The ground was frozen still, yet dark as death itself. The snow ended where the might of the south began, but in the end winter knew no limits to its reach.

Davos could scarcely remember a time when he had seen such a varied assembly of banners. He had vague memories of Robert Baratheon’s coronation, when a month of tourneys and celebrations had swollen the walls of King’s Landing until the lesser lords had to settle in the fields beyond the city.

All around him, banners that hadn’t flown alongside the standard of Stannis Baratheon. They did not burn at the Blackwater, with the best of their fleet, or fell the wildling army of Mance Rayder, or froze in hunger on the March to Winterfell. Trembled in the sea of The Stranger come again when the Others descended upon the Seven Kingdoms.

He tried to name those that he could recognize: the golden hand of House Allyrion, the sword upon a purple field of House Dayne, the white unicorn and black raven of House Dogett; Whent, Wode, Smallwood, and Grell of the Riverlands; Coldwater and Royce of the Vale. Others eluded him, but they made not much difference. All had been deaf to Stannis’ cause in the end.

Within sight of the walls, more familiar sigils that once fought against the stag when it was still painted in a burning heart: the rose of House Tyrell, the lion of House Lannister; Houses Redwyne, Connington, Hightower.

The northern host seemed small in comparison but Davos was not cowed by numbers. After all, he marched with the banners that pledged for his king. Each house as hard won as the last. They'd dipped their standards to the crowned stag in the end as they relieved themselves of the safety of their holdfasts to stand as a thinned mongrel of an army against the tide of death unleashed from ice.

“It comes as a great relief to me, Lord Davos, that we come to King’s Landing for peace and not for war,” said Harrion Karstark, Lord of Karhold, restored to his family’s seat after his uncle Arnolf was executed for his treason.

Davos chuckled. “If we did, then King’s Landing would surely know of it.”

Harrion smiled. “The North can assemble an army worthy of the Seven Kingdoms. The Lannisters saw it when Robb Stark called the banners of his father.”He grew silent, recalling the start of the war that nearly ended his family: his brothers dead at the Red Wedding, his father beheaded by the king he fought for, and Harrion himself kept prisoner at Riverrun for years. His sister, married to a Thenn; his uncle, a traitor to both the realm and the family.

“Gods be good, my lord, that it will no longer come to that,”Davos said.

“I trust the Lord Hand will counsel the king towards peace, even in this dark time.”

Davos smiled. “The Lord Hand will surely attempt it.”

The northern retainers made camp outside the walls beside the southron pavilions that seemed to drown out the greys, blacks, and whites of northern banners. The lords and mounted knights rode into King’s Landing alongside Davos.

Atop his destrier, the Lord Karstark’s scowl had deepened. The streets were crowded with people. The roar of the midday rush a wave of familiarity to Davos’ ears. This was his home, in the days before his onions, his knighthood, his lordship. His eldest sons were born here and for a time Davos thought they would die here too.  _I wasn’t far off,_ he thought sadly, casting a glance at the direction of the Blackwater.

“See there, my lord,” Davos told Harrion, nodding at an alley entrance half-hidden by the wares of a Tyroshi merchant. “My home.”

Harrion squinted past the crowd and saw Flea Bottom, the crowded and oftentimes suffocating commune of the poorest in King’s Landing. It was a gaping maw of dim light under the canopy of gap-toothed roofs over cramped homes. The smell a raw, pungent odor of refuse and filth.

“Not your home now, surely,” Harrion japed. “Or I would truly worry how your king treats his friends.”

Davos smiled. He was the Lord of the Rainwood, his domain a vast tract of hunting ground and arable land lorded over by the keep at Cape Wrath. It had been summer when he left it. The flowers were in full bloom, that morning’s bread freshly baked, and Marya—he remembered her with a pang—sat at table with their youngest, pouring milk, tutting over nothing with a smile on her lips.

“The home of my youth,” Davos said with a nod. He didn’t miss Flea Bottom, but it was a life that would never leave him. As much a part of Davos the smuggler as the maimed hand that raised him from it.

The highborns took room in the manses surrounding Visenya’s Hill, as was their right, while the rest found board in the many inns inside the city walls, no doubt most of them full to bursting.

Davos thought to find the king first before anyone else. It was his duty as the Hand, dictated by the role he had always played before Stannis even became king. But as he went inside the keep, he was ushered into the throne room in the confusion of servants, pages, and cupbearers that mistook him for yet another southron lordling.

He found himself at the back of a thick audience, the Iron Throne looming high above them at the far end. To his left, the balcony was, in contrast, sparsely peopled with those he assumed to be the members of the new small council. He recognized Axell Florent, the new Master of Coin; Lord Corliss Penny, in the white armor of the Kingsguard,  anointed Lord Commander; Pylos, the new Grand Maester despite his years.

He didn’t know the others, but he remembered the names writ in the raven from several months past. Princess Nymeria of House Martell, Master of Laws; Ser Gilbert Farring, the Justiciar, twin to Princess Nymeria's office when Stannis had separated the writing of laws from the execution of it; Asha Greyjoy of the Iron Islands, the Grand Admiral of the Fleet. The seat for the Master of Whispers remained vacant, and Davos suspected that Stannis was mistrusting of the office yet was unable to argue against its uses.

It struck Davos that he would be one of them, staring down at the lords and ladies that wanted too many things from the throne. Not for the first time he felt smaller than he was.  _Raised from mud by my onions._ He would take his seat as Hand of the King, speak with the king’s voice, and judge with the king’s laws.

A cold sweat broke at the back of his neck. He felt the urge to clutch at his finger bones but it had been years since they were lost at the Blackwater. Much had changed since then and Davos ever needed the comfort they gave him. Mayhap now more than ever.

His eyes flew quickly to the Iron Throne, expecting his son in the livery of the Kingsguard standing beside it but didn’t find him. Sat on the throne was not Stannis but Selyse, restored to the dignity of which she was acquainted—the clean lines of dress, the colors of House Florent glittering in precious metals and jewels on the new crown sitting on her brow. She once wore a fire-tipped crown sibling to her husband’s, when she still prayed to the Lord of Light and kept the counsel of the Lady Melisandre.

Like his finger bones, those days were long gone. A new crown had taken its place, a thin band of white gold shining against the dull brown of her hair.

She had grown gaunt in the last year when Shireen’s death had nearly destroyed her. The troubled rest she found at Winterfell upon her rescue did little to restore her spirit. Nevertheless she sat now as she had when she held court for her husband at Dragonstone. She had yet to appear hale, but it was a start.

Proud, her family called her;  _arrogant_ , her enemies would say, with her patrician nose, her Florent ears, and tall figure, she was not  _beautiful_  but she was a queen nonetheless. She seemed to wear the title truly now.

Even as a steady stream of lords bent their knees at the foot of the throne, pledged the allegiance of this House and that House, and sang their praises when once they shed the blood of her husband’s army, she sat unmoving and rigid, her small nods almost imperceptible from where Davos stood.

Just then, a page dressed in Florent colors leaned in close to whisper in her ear. Queen Selyse raised a hand to halt the proceedings. As she listened, her eyes scanned the room…and found him, cast half in shadow by the people that towered over him.

 _The king sees all_ , he once heard tell. From such a height, the king certainly would, and the king did so now through the shrewd, frigid stare of the queen.

The page alerted the herald at the foot of the throne. His bellowing voice filled the room. “Make way for Davos of the House Seaworth, Lord of the Rainwood, and Hand of the King.”

All of a sudden, what felt like a thousand eyes swung to root him in his place. Even the small council peered from the balcony, squinting as they struggled to find him in the crowd.

“My Lord Hand,” the queen called over to him. “You finally grace us with your presence.”

Davos fought his way to the front but he need not have struggled much. The crowd already parted for him until finally nothing stood between him and the Iron Throne.

Upon closer inspection, he realized that the queen’s feet remained bound in bandages. They rested on a low stool, making her long legs bend slightly at the knee under her dress. She’d lost nearly half of her toes and three fingers at Castle Black. A small mercy, Davos thought, but Selyse was ever proud, and it must have pained her to show her wounds out in the open.

“Your Grace,” Davos said, bending the knee in deep reverence. “It’s been a hard journey south.”

Selyse nodded. “But it was well, I hope,” she said, her courtesies ever correct.

There was no love lost between them but Selyse knew that her husband prized his counsel well above most, even hers. In a different time they had stood as rivals for Stannis’ ear—if Selyse cared for her husband’s love, then she could have found him rival for that as well. But the loss of their daughter had left her much changed, and where there had once been hostility there was now quiet acceptance. She was queen, and he was Hand. They had endured far worse.

“Very well, Your Grace, the northern lords were very hospitable.”

Selyse nodded again and Davos felt that that was the end of it. Thus acknowledged, he expected to be dismissed. “My husband roams the city with the Commander of the City Watch. He means to replenish the gold cloaks and restore garrisons across the city,” the last she said for the benefit of the audience, a hint as much as an invitation for the pledges of allegiance to turn into pledges of swords.

“Very good, Your Grace. I await his return,” Davos bowed low once again.

“Ser Devan rides with him,”Selyse added unexpectedly. It was a kindness coming from her, some attempt at goodwill that caught Davos unawares. He looked at her to see if she meant otherwise but found no dishonesty there.

At last, Selyse waved a hand and the herald bellowed once again. Some lord of some holdfast hurried to take Davos’ place at the foot of the throne and Davos, his head swimming, rose to his feet and obliged him.

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t until the last of the fires had been lit for the evening that Davos was summoned to the king’s solar. Midday had waned to the afternoon and still Stannis had yet to return to the Red Keep. He’d told himself there was no cause to worry. The new Commander of the City Watch was Godfry Farring, cousin to the new Justiciar and loyal to House Baratheon as he’d marched to Winterfell and won acclaim at Castle Black. With repute as large as himself—and nearly as large as the giant he’d slain—Davos was certain that he would command respect as well as fear that Stannis would be safe in his presence.

Devan had been the one to knock on his door. In his armor, his great helm, and the white cloak that billowed behind him, Davos hardly recognized the sudden jarring weight of his son’s embrace.

“Father,” the boy said, and Davos ached to hear his voice again. It had changed in the last year, dipping low and shedding the last pitch of boyhood. “I’ve missed you.”

Devan had just turned fifteen when he was anointed into knighthood. After the battle was won in the north and Devan proved himself a worthy soldier, Stannis knighted the boy himself.

 _Ser Devan Seaworth_ , Davos had called him once they were behind closed doors. The boy—the  _knight_ —had cried then, after the bloodshed and the battles had been done, Davos held him in his arms as he wept. It had not been for joy but mourning. Devan had been at the Wall during the mutiny, kept in chains as the fire raged around Shireen.  _Her screams, father_ , Devan had said, his cheeks wet.  _She screamed and screamed._

That boy was now sixteen, by all rights a man grown. He’d lifted his helm and Davos held his face in his hands, looking into his eyes and the tears that swam there. This was not for mourning, he saw; for joy, at seeing Davos, at the white cloak he now bore proudly.

“Oh, Devan,” Davos smiled, and kissed his forehead. He chuckled when Devan had to bend slightly for his father to reach him.  _When did you become so tall?_

The moment lasted all of a wink. All too quickly, Devan, the knight of the Kingsguard, pulled away from his father. He tucked his helm under his arm and wiped his eyes.

“I told myself I wouldn’t cry,”he said with a laugh.

Davos laughed as well. “There’s no harm in tears, Devan.”

“ _Ser_ Devan,” his son teased with a grin.

Davos grinned. “I do apologize, Ser Devan Seaworth. Bearer of the white cloak.”

"Stanny writes that they would come to King's Landing soon, is this true?" Devan asked, his eyes bright.

Davos nodded, mirroring the happiness on his son's face. His boy, a knight of the Kingsguard; his wife Marya at his side and their youngest boys, Stanny and Steffon... his family once again whole, living in the Red Keep. 

 _I'm dreaming_ , he thought dazedly. 

For a moment he couldn't speak, his heart in his throat. In the silence, Devan clutched his shoulder. A solid weight of reassurance, the white gauntleted hand of the knight like an anchor on his father's shoulder. Davos leaned some of his weight against him, all of a sudden feeling the tiredness deep in his bones.

_We'll be together again._

“Come, father, my Lord Hand,” his son said, gathering the formality of his office around him. But his smile remained, and it stunned Davos to see the sweet boy he’d raised in the dashing regalia he bore now with grace. “The king has been looking for you.”


	4. Davos Seaworth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HYPERVENTILATING BECAUSE IT'S A DAVOS CHAPTER. We've passed the halfway mark woohoo, almost there, almost done.

**(302 AC)**

 

He found Stannis of the House Baratheon, First of His Name, peering closely at the parchments that littered his desk. The solar that once housed kings both great and terrible was a far cry from the dark depths carved into the barren rock of Dragonstone.

The last winking light of day could be seen from the wide windows that looked out into the Blackwater, where only years past the king that sat before him had waged a battle that saw his ships aflame in wildfire.

 _How far we_ _’_ _ve come_ , he thought.

“Davos,” Stannis greeted him, laying down the parchments in his hand.

“Your Grace,” Davos said, bowing low. He’d never needed such formalities and Stannis never demanded it, but there he was, in the Red Keep, with the most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms.

Stannis met this with bemusement that Davos had to stifle a smile.

In truth, he had meant to bend the knee when he saw Stannis again, expecting him to be on the Iron Throne. But closed doors were for secrecy and the divestment of rigid formality. Though Stannis was not one for comfort and ease, Davos knew he enjoyed a privilege that was only for him. Stannis, his head bare of his crown, dressed down from the raiment of his office in a simple doublet and lambswool breeches.

Stannis gestured for him to sit and he did. For a while it was as though they had no words for each other when, in truth, they had much to speak of. Davos had written a list of things to discuss but for the life of him remembered nothing.

“You’ve come to finally take your place as my Hand,” Stannis said, his voice a mild rasp in his throat. Devan had told him that the cold had affected the king’s constitution. A cough rattled his chest when he kept to his feet too often, and broke his silence with a mild shiver in his throat like a cart wheeled on rusted hinges.

Still, Stannis seemed as proud as he’d ever been. A great weight must have lifted from his shoulders once he ascended the Iron Throne. His broad shoulders were unbowed, his eyes sharp as ever. Despite all of this, however, Stannis did not appear relieved of anything. It was though the weight had only shifted but never truly left.

“I’ve come to serve my king, Your Grace.”

“At long last,” Stannis said, not unkindly. "I had thought you'd grown too fond of the north."

 _I've grown fond of the Starks, not the north_ , Davos mused, but he knew for a fact tht the Starks believed one and two were the same. The north was not the north without a Stark in Winterfell, and a Stark was nothing without the winds of winter flushing the summer from their hair.

With great warmth, he recalled the friendly talks he’d shared with Lady Sansa, the cheerful nonsense of the Lord Stark as he played in the godswood. Rickon’s direwolf trailed behind him as he spoke to the trees, calling them as they were his brothers. Many an afternoon were spent chatting with “Bran” and “Jon.”

 _He's lonely,_ Davos had told Sansa. She only pursed her lips as she watched her brother, running this way and that, sitting on the great roots of the heart tree. The secrets of the north wrapped around her like a thick fur. _Don't you worry about Rickon, Lord Davos,_ Sansa reassured him, a strained smile on her face. _He is much loved._

There had been no room for talk between him and his king when Davos returned from Skagos, his hair a bit thinner and his beard thick with winter snows. Stannis had believed him dead until that day even though Lord Manderly assured that it was an impostor he had tarred and burned at White Harbor. When Daenerys came and brought fire upon Brandon’s Gift, Davos was still on a galley rocking in the icy seas. When Selyse was freed from Castle Black and news of Shireen’s death finally reached them, Davos had not been at his side either. When Stannis left for King's Landing, Davos had stayed behind, watching over the restoration of Winterfell, brick by brick, and very few words had passed between them.

A year had passed since then, and Davos saw that, as with Selyse, much had changed in his king. As gaunt as his queen, his eyes tired and worn, and his hair thinned even further, he appeared spent, diminished.

Davos dared to smile. As expected, Stannis did not return it, but his manner did ease somewhat as he leaned back in his seat.

He produced something cloth-bound from a drawer of his desk. He opened it to reveal something shining dully in the dim light. The Hand wrought in gold. The Hand that had brought its past bearers through the veil of death. Tywin Lannister, Eddard Stark, Jon Arryn, and the numerous Hands of Aerys Targaryen before him.

The Hand as it been for three hundred years with the added detail of the crowned stag engraved across the knuckles.

_Eddard Stark wore this once. Where is he now?_

"This is yours," Stannis said, breaking the silence. Davos looked up at him to find that his king watched him with a heavy gaze. He rose from his chair, pin in hand, and approached Davos where he stood.

Davos kept still as Stannis fastened the pin on his chest. His heart beat in his throat. The pin weighed next to nothing, but it was hardly air that weighed down his breast now. _Davos of Flea Bottom, how far you've come._

"The Hand serves until his death," said Stannis, his voice low. "Or if the becomes unfit for the office."

The king of the Seven Kingdoms, his head bare, his sleeves loose about his bony wrists, had elected a lowborn to the second highest office in the realm.

Davos found his voice. "Until his death," he told Stannis, meeting his eyes. A reassurance. _I have gone to the ends of the earth in your name_ , Davos thought. _I would do it again._

"Highborn men have carried this pin," Stannis said. "But it was Orys Baratheon that had worn it first. Aegon Targaryen chose him when lords from ancient families thought themselves more worthy of the honor. Mayhap the rumors were true and they were brothers after all, but Orys had proven himself far above the rumors of bastardy. He was loyal to his king until his thirst for vengeance got the better of him."

"Your Grace, I..." Davos swallowed, his uncertainty rising anew.

Stannis shook his head with a touch of impatience. "There is no man fitter, I’ve told you this before. I’ll not say it again," he said, in a tone that invited no argument. "You have been my Hand for years. This," he gestured at the pin, "is a trinket that changes nothing."

 _A trinket that better men have died for,_ Davos thought.

"But I'll trust you'll wear it proudly all the same with that thrice-damned honor you're so proud of," Stannis' lips twisted in a ghost of a smile.

In the end, the only thing left for Davos to do was to accept the weight as it was handed to him. With a sudden heavy heart, he did so. Terror and dread gripped him, but relief was there also, that he could finally serve his king in a time of peace.

Stannis studied him for a moment then nodded with both approval and finality. “To business, then," Stannis said, walking back to his desk and resuming his seat. "I’ve heard tell of the burning of the Dreadfort. Are the rumors true?”

"Indeed, Your Grace," Davos said, clearing his throat as he took the chair opposite his king. _To business._

Just before he left, he had accompanied the Lord Stark and his sister as they traveled to the Dreadfort armed only with kindling and the king's justice. After the death of Roose Bolton at the Battle of Ice and the consequent burning of Ramsay Snow within sight of Winterfell's walls, the Dreadfort was free from its rightful claimants. Sansa had given ample warning to the garrison that remained there. _Leave, or burn with the keep._

When they arrived, the Dreadfort was empty. The few people that had stayed were retainers and mounted knights that did nothing but plunge their swords in the snow, bending the knee to House Stark. Sansa showed them mercy and Rickon, uncomprehending in his youth, recited the words that Sansa whispered in his ear. It was Sansa that lit the fires first; but it was Rickon who stared at the lick of flames in the winter sky. _Pretty fire, Shaggy_ , Rickon had said, his gloved hands buried in the direwolf's thick fur. After a while, the wolf howled, a long and haunting sound that was answered only by the whistle of cold winds and the cracking of the fire.

"Poor Shaggy. He rides alone now," said Sansa, "Ghost will never leave the Wall without Jon." Her words were soft as pity yet her eyes betrayed the steel of envy. Or was it memory? Davos never knew for certain. The Lady Sansa spoke with grace, not honesty, and Davos, however much Rickon trusted him with his life, was not privy to his sister's truths.

The Dreadfort had burned for days and the rubble that was left was torn to the ground until the Dreadfort and the Flayed Man were no more.

“It's one less holdfast to give out to your allies, Your Grace,” Davos said, and not lightly. “All the better for it.”

Stannis nodded. “Though I had won the battle against Roose Bolton, the right of justice falls to Rickon Stark as his right as Warden of the North. A child of five, is he?”

“Seven, Your Grace.”

“All the same, a child still, and his sister not much older. But Lady Sansa has got a good head on her shoulders, it would seem. I trust she would act in her brother’s stead in good judgment,” Stannis said.

 _High praise,_ Davos thought. Sansa had shed the clout of Petyr Baelish at exactly the right time, when he brought a host of ten thousand swords to Brandon's Gift to aid in the fighting. She'd sent a raven to Stannis after Littlefinger's descent from the Eyrie and when he arrived in the north, he was welcomed with shackles, stripped of his titles, and sent to Winterfell in chains to await his trial after the battles were over. Alayne Stone had descended the Eyrie as Sansa Stark, deaf to the lies that Littlefinger spun in his attempt to save himself. When at last he was found guilty, Stannis swung the sword himself.  _In the manner of the north_ , Sansa had said, steel in her eyes.

“As do I,” Davos agreed. “Repairs at Winterfell are hardly complete but it’s all a matter of time until they are. Brandon’s Gift remains a stretch of wooden houses and ramshackle camps, however,” Davos said of the wildlings that marched with Stannis, earning their keep upon the Gift once the Others had been routed from it. The grasslands and moors that grew there were nearly destroyed by dragonfire, but the wildlings had only laughed at his concerns. They’d made homes from ice; they could do the same with scorched earth, they'd said.

“House Stark must see to its restorations but if they’re in want of builders, they need only ask. King’s Landing does not lack for smiths and woodworkers.”

Davos nodded. “They would be most grateful for the help, Your Grace.”

Stannis moved quickly to other matters, producing a sheet of parchment with names of highborn knights, some unknown to Davos.

“The Kingsguard must needs seven swords to guard the king and his family, and I mean to continue the tradition.”

Of the seven, he had only five: Ser Devan, Ser Rolland Storm, Ser Corliss Penny the Lord Commander, Ser Richard Horpe, and Ser Harys Cobb. King and Queen’s Men all. If Justin Massey had not been awarded Blackhaven, the vacant seat of House Dondarrion, then he would have been the sixth.

Davos peered at the list and found, to his great surprise, Ser Garlan Tyrell of Highgarden among the listed highborns. “You consider a Tyrell, Your Grace?”

Stannis grit his teeth but nodded all the same. “Tyrells have fought me at every corner, starting from the Siege of Storm’s End. It was Ser Garlan that had donned my brother’s armor at the Blackwater, did you know?” His lips twisted in a grimace. “The Ghost of Renly they called him, the omen that spurred fear into my men and inspired retreat.”

Davos frowned. He'd heard tell of the great host that smashed Stannis' forces, the crushing defeat led by Renly himself. Or so many said.

“But he is a knight worthy of his title. A good warrior and able in battle.”

“Yet a Tyrell all the same,” Davos pressed. He thought of Jaime Lannister, the Kingslayer. He too had been the most valiant knight of his age yet raised his sword against his own king and killed him at the foot of the throne he'd sworn to protect.

Stannis made an impatient noise but Davos saw that despite all that, Stannis listened to him still. He thought of Maester Cressen. _Speak to him_ , the old man had said. _You have his ear._

“Yes, a Tyrell. I have sent his brother Loras to the Wall, stripped him of the honor of the Kingsguard.”

Davos heard tell of it. Loras, half-blinded by the injuries sustained in his siege of Dragonstone, yet thought by all that he was being punished for the treason of his family.

“I can’t make enemies of Highgarden anymore. I don’t trust them and I vow to never let a Tyrell sit the small council as long as I live." Mace Tyrell has been sent into exile in the Free Cities, for his treason as well as his defiance. His heir Willas saw the wisdom of bending the knee when Mace Tyrell did not. “Lord Willas has sent five hundred swords to the Wall and was not shy of reminding me that her sister was yet a maid but I don’t need a wife. Even if I did, I still would not wed a Tyrell.”

A Tyrell in the Kingsguard, however, was another matter. The Kingsguard served for life, and Stannis was going to be king for a while yet. Garlan would stand by his door as he slept and guard over his every move until death freed either of them from their duty.

“Your Grace, Ser Garlan is married,” Davos pointed out. Stannis dismissed it with a light shrug, as though it was a trifle of a thing easily unwritten by the king’s command. Like as not, it was. Davos straightened. “I don’t presume to know the laws of court—“

“But you should know them, Davos,” said Stannis. "And know them well. If you tell true, then you will be in court a while yet."

His nerves unfurled anew at the implication. _This is not my_ place. His hand came up to grasp at his fingerbones but found only the pin that had replaced them. "There are other knights just as suited to the position, Your Grace.”

He ran over the list again: Harrold Hardyng, rival claimant to the Vale against the young Robert Arryn; a Fossoway, a Bracken, a Sunglass, a Bar Emmon, a Peake. A slew of Flowers, Hills, Waters, Stones, Storms, Sands, and Snows, each one a lesser threat than a Tyrell. At each name, Stannis remained unaffected. The king knew only few of them and trusted none. But it was not trust that his king was looking for now, Davos realized. _Politics,_ he thought with a pang. _With peace came the limitless underhanded wars in politics._

“I have five loyal knights, your son among them. They have withstood far worse than lofty highborns. Winter, hunger, and the undead have hardened their steel. They would need no tourneys to speak of their skill because they have won far more than tilts and pageantry." Stannis uttered the last with a vehemence that recalled his dislike of his own brothers. "A Tyrell may be born of cunning but a Tyrell does not slaughter kings in their sleep.”

Davos scratched at his beard, mulling it over. “Are you certain?”

“No,” Stannis grit his teeth. “It’s a gamble, surely. But I am a king in truth now and I sit the Iron Throne. It is my duty to keep the peace.” The king's impatience grew. "He dared to declare himself Lord of Brightwater Keep when he besieged it for Tommen. House Tyrell had dishonored House Florent and that cannot go unpunished.”

With that, Davos began to understand his argument better. Stannis never forgave a slight. Even when he wished for justice, he did so with the vindictiveness of a long-held grudge.

“You remain unconvinced,” Stannis observed.

Davos stirred from his silence. “In truth?”

Stannis nodded. “As always,” he said curtly, annoyance was plain on his face. “My dissent has never stopped you before.” _But mine often stopped you_ , Davos thought. 

“I think it unwise,” he began, keeping his tone even despite the slight panic he felt at the thought of losing this argument. _He listens to you._ “You have the opportunity to rebuild the Kingsguard with your own men. Ser Ormund Wylde has proven his loyalty, surely. Ser William Foxglove, mayhap, or Ser Humfrey Clifton.” If more Queen’s Men had survived the mutiny at the Wall he would have named them as well, in his desperation to change Stannis’ mind. “Recall Ser Andrew from the Free Cities. He would honor the white cloak.” Ser Andrew was of Stannis’ own blood and his former squire besides. He would be loyal to the last, Davos was sure of it.

Stannis had sat in silence, his expression betraying nothing. _Listen to me,_ Davos begged in his mind.

“Leave this,” the king said abruptly, his voice stern. “I will decide another day.”

His worry didn't leave him. “But you will—“

Stannis waved him off impatiently. “Yes, yes, ease your prattling, Davos,” he said without heat. “I’m your king, not your child.”

Thus chastised, Davos quietened. Another day, then.

“The small council,” Stannis began anew, clearing his throat. “Thinks it best that I arrange matters of succession as early as now, lest a Great Council after my death tore the Seven Kingdoms apart in the grapple for the Iron Throne. It cannot stand empty after me.”

 _Succession,_ Davos thought, and Shireen’s face came to his mind’s eye. The quiet girl he’d known since her birth, the heir to House Baratheon, who’d never lived to see her father sit the throne he’d fought for.

His eyes closed at the memory of her, and grief unfurled in his breast. When next he opened his eyes, he saw Stannis’ gaze cast adrift, unseeing yet clouded with the grief that Davos himself felt.

“The queen is able to—“

Stannis shook his head slowly. _He_ _’_ _s miles away... back at the Wall where Shireen had needed him the most._ “She cannot bear the thought of having another child.” Stannis made no mention of himself, of his own wants, but Davos saw it plainly.  

Even before the days of war, Stannis and Selyse barely managed to conceive. Sons either died in her belly or were born too soon to live. When Shireen finally came, pink and healthy, before the greyscale came to her in the cradle, Davos had seen Stannis at the brink of happiness. Relief and horror had made his hands stiff and awkward as the babe was first brought into his arms.

“And I will not marry again,” Stannis said, his gaze returning to Davos. “She is my queen. I will not dishonor her so.” But it was not only the queen that he wished to protect, Davos suspected.

 _Have you mourned her?_ He wanted to ask. A foolish question, surely, but he knew that Stannis, in his dogged attempt to bring the realm to rights would not have had the time for much else, let alone the long days of mourning required of a father at the loss of his child.

He remained as kingly as ever, his jaw set and his face betraying nothing, but the dark cast in his eyes spoke of grief such that Davos had not seen from Stannis—not when Robert had died, or when he woke to discover Renly struck down in his pavilion.

Davos knew the pain of loss. He’d lost four of his own sons and took comfort only in the fact that he still had three boys that needed his survival. As he lay starving on the rock that saved him after the Blackwater, he’d thought about the relief of death only to find strength anew when he his mind drifted to his family.

Stannis had no other children. A king to a realm engulfed in the Long Night and the imminent threat of the Great Other in the north, he had no heirs.

“I promised her she would be safe,” Stannis said. He was not referring to his wife. “Before we marched from Castle Black, she came to me, speaking of shadows in the night... Some nonsense about fire and Stone Dragons. It was those thrice-damned night terrors, I'd thought.” _I should have listened_ , went unsaid, but Davos caught it all the same. “I promised her, Davos, that she was safer there. Deepwood Motte was too far and Winterfell even farther... farther than she could see from the tower of Castle Black. War was no place for a child, I told her.”

A shudder racked his thin chest, mangling the last of his words. He brought a fist to his mouth as he coughed, ghastly bellows from deep within him. It sounded like death itself rattled his frame and Davos grimaced on his behalf.

Angered by illness, Stannis grimaced as well. Wetness pricked at his eyes. Davos mistook it for the pain of drawing breath, but even as his chest calmed and the cough died in his throat Stannis’ eyes remained raw in a ferocity of emotion Davos had never seen in his king.

“I _promised_ her,” he said again, each word bitten out in rage directed at no one. Mayhap it was The Stranger himself that took the barb, Davos thought. _But it's the king that bleeds._

If Stannis had been one of his boys, Davos would not hesitate to give him comfort. But Stannis was his king, and kings did not need the comfort of lowborn men.

Davos had no words to offer and so he sat in silence and watched as Stannis’ hands trembled where they clutched at the arms of his chair; the anger that grit his teeth; the despair that darkened his eyes until they were more black than blue.

Shireen had been denied much as a child—the company of friends, the carefree innocence of youth, the affection she craved yet never asked for. _Your father loves you_ , Davos had once said to her, even though he knew it was not his place to speak for his liege lord. Her smile had brightened that day yet she never thought to ask if it was the truth. As though it were a fiction she’d written in her head that no one else knew, and hearing it from someone else gave her hope that the fiction was true.

Davos kept the memory close to his heart. He thought to share it now but it would not be a kindness to do so.

“She was a good child,” Davos said again, “a sweet child, truly. She will never be forgotten, Your Grace.”

"Selyse and I will not think to replace her with another. The council,” he grimaced, “thinks it unwise. I need an heir, they say, and I _know_ this. It is my duty to the realm, even to Daenerys Targaryen.”

Davos met Stannis’ eyes with the reluctance of someone who knew he would face the king’s wrath. “The boy is in Lys, Your Grace.”

 _The boy_ could refer to so many, yet Davos referred to only one and Stannis knew it. Surprisingly, the king was not so annoyed by the idea as Davos had expected. _He's thought of this_ , Davos realized. _Then why does he hesitate?_

"I need not look far. Princess Arianne thinks to change the laws, adopting the Rhoynish customs of inheritance of the Iron Throne. Robert has another bastard in the Vale, born when Robert was still Lord Arryn's ward. If I raise all of Robert's bastards to House Baratheon, she will be the heir as the eldest in Rhoynish laws."

Mya Stone was her name, or so the _Lineages_ had it writ. Black of hair like the Baratheons that never called her one of theirs.

"But she's of lowborn stock," Stannis continued. "As a bastard, she may be undermined. As a woman, she may struggle to win the favor of court."

_Lowborn, she will be despised._

Though decorated with lands, titles, and incomes, though he bore the golden Hand at his breast, Davos knew he would never be respected. His sons would find renown. Devan in the Kingsguard; Steff and Stanny learning their letters from the maester at Cape Wrath in the manner of highborns that surrounded their keep. Davos, however, had been born in the backwaters of King's Landing, and highborns misliked the smell of mud.

"If Shireen had survived, she would have faced opposition as well when her time came to take the throne," Davos said.

"I had meant to adopt the Rhoynish laws to strengthen her claim after my death," agreed Stannis. "The realm once bled when the King Viserys made Rhaenyra his heir. It was a Dance of death that killed her in the end and she never became queen as her father intended."

"Will you adopt the laws for Mya Stone?"

"Princess Arianne will leave for Oldtown in a fortnight to consult the maesters. The law will be passed before year's end. I'll make sure of it."

"But this is not for the girl,"Davos said. It was not a question.

The king shook his head and his eyes spoke much of what he kept in his heart.

 _No,_ Davos knew then. _It's for Shireen._

 


	5. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops this update took longer than expected. Had to change some stuff about Edric at the last minute. Thanks again to [xylodemon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/xylodemon) for putting up with me. :*

**(312 AC)**

 

The Prince of Storm’s End was little more than a bundle of frayed nerves and anxiousness as he paced up and down the corridor. Footsteps echoed against stone, breaking the silence. He was alone but for the two knights of the Kingsguard posted by the closed doors of his wife’s chambers.

“Edric, I could find a chair for you if you like,” said one of the knights. Ser Andrew, made more robust by age. He smiled at his cousin, his helm tucked casually under his arm. To Andrew’s left stood Ser Garlan Tyrell with a look of amusement that mirrored that of his fellow Kingsguard. He kept his tongue, as he usually did. He’d been on the Kingsguard for nearly as long as Edric had been in King’s Landing but he had yet to completely warm to the rest of the court.

Edric shook his head. He was the heir to the Iron Throne, a man grown at twenty six. In the last eight years, he’d learned much, _done_ much, earned the respect of his peers and faced the anger of lords. It was galling to think that he would be so undone now.

 _Pull yourself together_ , he told himself.

“They can’t be taking so long,” Edric muttered, talking to no one in particular. He paced even faster, hands combing through his hair. “I’ve heard of… of… difficult births…”

“Wylla’s a healthy young woman, cousin,” Ser Andrew said. “I wouldn’t worry.”

Edric waved him off impatiently. “You don’t _know_ that.”

What did Andrew know of births anyway? What did _any_ of them know of this?

 “I _do_ know that you’re worrying yourself into a knot,” Ser Andrew said, grinning.

“Oh, you must love this, don’t you,” Edric snapped at him, his temper flaring. He didn’t like to appear so _weak_ in front of others.

Ser Andrew only shrugged. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy _some_ of it.” His eyes flickered past Edric’s shoulder. “Ah, Devan! Here for the birth, are you?”

Edric turned to find Ser Devan Seaworth slowing his slight jog down the corridor. His face was flushed but the smile was bright on his lips.

“Did I miss it?” Devan asked, looking from one to other.

“I wouldn’t be here if it had already happened, would I,” Edric snapped again.

Devan raised his eyebrows. His smile dimmed as he remembered himself. “I apologize, Your Grace.”

With a sigh, Edric slowed his own steps. He was tired. He’d been pacing for almost an hour now, waiting for news. For _something, someone_ , to come out of that _bloody room_ and end his waiting.

“No, no… I apologize, Devan. I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” Edric said, folding in on himself.

“He gets an apology and I don’t?” Ser Andrew sighed. “How you’ve changed, cousin.”

“ _Andrew_ ,” Edric grated out. A smile tugged at his lips anyway and the tension eased. “I worry, alright?”

Ser Garlan cleared his throat. “The princess is of a healthy constitution, Your Grace. And Grand Maester Pylos reassured you, didn’t he? He _would_ know.”

Ser Garlan would have been his goodbrother if Lord Willas had had his way and their sister Margaery in the birthing room, carrying Edric's child, had his uncle permitted it.

But it was Wylla Manderly that he wed some years after their betrothal. A reward for the Manderlys, a foothold in the north for the Iron Throne. It was a good match, his uncle said, and Edric saw the sense in it. The loud-mouthed northern maid with the green hair and the willful smile, who'd fought Edric at every turn and made him feel twice the man he was while at the same time cutting him down to size.

He hadn't expected to love her and it certainly wasn't asked of him but here he was, a ball of anxiety for her and their child, loving her anyway.

Edric nodded, calming himself. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“Seven hells, I _just_ said the same thing,” Ser Andrew said again.

"Sers, _please_. Don’t squabble,” Edric told him, affection softening his words.

He was grateful for their presence, truly. For a while, the Kingsguard had been his only companions, when King’s Landing had been another strange place to get used to. He’d been removed from Storm’s End, from Dragonstone, and from the brief happiness he found in Lys, to be dropped into the Red Keep with the eyes of the realm sizing up the unlikely heir to the Iron Throne.

 _Bastard Prince._ Nobody truly called him this to his face but Edric was not deaf to whispers, of which there had been many.

 

* * *

 

Lys had been his home for three years. He lived in a manse made of sandstone and ground seashells, roofed with baked clay. It sat on the estate of Salladhor Saan, tucked in a less populated part of Lys. A sprawl of villas, one for each of his concubines, cousins, aunts and uncles, at the foot of a hill near the coast. Slaves had lit the fires in his room, cooked his food, and dusted the many trinkets and artifacts that littered the manse. Tyroshi carpets; Myrish silks; skulls of nameless beasts inlaid with gold; treasures from a vast world that only a pirate could assemble. In the mornings he listened the peddling of fishermen, on their way to the early morning trade at the portside fish market.

The sea was calm in Lys. The surf was a gentle roll of the tide on the pebbled shores, unlike the choppy waves that engulfed Shipbreaker Bay in cold, persistent fury clawing at the roughened cliffs.

For a while, his sworn swords and protectors had been his only family. His cousin Andrew taught him how to fight; Ser Gerald Gower bought him his first real sword. A good, heavy blade with antlers engraved on the leather-bound pommel. Lewys the Fishwife taught him how to sail. Triston of Taly Hill, a son of a farmer in the Crownlands, taught him the wealth of tilled earth.

In the afternoons he played with some of Salladhor’s children, nephews, and nieces. Tales of the Ninepenny Kings replaced the myths of his father’s Rebellion. In his dreams he had become a great pirate-king, roaming the seas of the Known World and beyond, no longer the conquering hero that felled the dragon on the Trident.

His thoughts had often strayed to Shireen, the only cousin he ever knew. _You_ _’_ _d like it here,_ he would tell her in letters that were never sent.

Salladhor Saan’s ships often passed the ports of Lys bearing news from the Seven Kingdoms. War ravaged the realm, the ship captains often said. _And what of my uncle?_ Edric would ask.Answers differed, contradicting each other: defeated, victorious, dead, alive. Only Ser Andrew’s reassurances calmed him at night, but even his stalwart guardian, once his uncle's squire and loyal to him because of it, had been tinged with uncertainty.

One day, Davos Seaworth had come to Lys to once again secret him away from the life he knew. Edric was no longer the boy of thirteen that could be persuaded by fear. _This is my home now_ , he had said. _I don_ _’_ _t want to leave_.

In the end, he had no choice. He'd mourned Shireen for a night and a day, saying his prayers to the small altar of The Mother that Lewys had fashioned out of driftwood and leftover steel from the smiths. _She should've come with me_ , he'd told Davos. _She would have been safe here._

He came to King's Landing with anger in his heart. For the cousin he knew and for the years that were lost to him though he knew it was not his place as a bastard to want more than what he was given. _You'll be a Baratheon in truth now_ , Davos had told him, sadness in his eyes. _King Stannis will make you his heir._

 _He only wants me because he needs me_ , Edric had said in anger, to which Davos had no comfort to give him. _Your uncle is not kind,_ Davos had said instead, _but he's a good man. Mayhap you'll find it in your heart to understand him_.

But becoming a prince meant more than just his name writ in the laws. As a bastard, he was largely unloved. Lords saw him unworthy and thought his uncle replaceable because of him.

The king that claimed him had not been more welcoming, and the queen barely acknowledged his presence. Though Edric was the blood of both of their families--like Shireen, half Baratheon and half Florent--he was, in truth, an outsider. And he knew it.

Anger and helplessness had cast a shadow on his return to the Seven Kingdoms. He'd longed for the summer in Lys, where life was foreign and strange but, for all of that, simple. Happy.

Ser Andrew was raised to the Kingsguard and became his sworn sword, Edric's only companion in King's Landing until Devan became an unexpected friend. The lowborn squire was now a knight of the highest order, and the baseborn cousin now the heir to the Iron Throne.

 _I was envious of you, you know,_ Edric had confessed to Devan. _You knew my cousin better than I did. She preferred your company over mine._

Devan, surprised, had only laughed. _I was envious of you for the same reason._ Then he'd sobered, turning wistful. _I had dreamed of marrying her someday. A fool's dream._

Edric was no stranger to such dreams. For years he'd kept the fantasy of one day becoming a Baratheon in truth, who would sup with lords and ladies at the high table. Introduced by his uncle Renly to the vassal lords of the Stormlands, receiving their platitudes as they bent the knee and pledged their allegiance. Bastards did not raise banners. They didn't have the honor of bearing the standard into battle. They lived as though in secrecy, hiding in the walls, in the cracks between the stone, until trueborns found it convenient to remember them.

 _You were there, weren't you? When she.._.

Devan had closed his eyes against the memory. Not even the hard, ornate armor of the Kingsguard could protect him from the screams he heard in his head.

 _They dragged the queen and the princess from the Nightfort back to Castle Black and tossed them in the icy cells._ It was the first time Edric listened to the tale in full. Davos never told him, and the king never spoke of it.

The mutinous brothers of the Night's Watch put the Queen's Men to the sword. Some had surrendered and they were shown the mercy of chains, tied to posts in the courtyard to freeze to death in the deepening snows of winter. Devan had been showed the same courtesy.

In the dead of night, the fool Patchface had come to Shireen's cell. Devan woke from the chill to the queen's screams echoing in the night. Patchface, singing his nonsensical songs with a crazed look on his face, doused her in oil and put her to the torch in the courtyard. Roused from their slumber, men of the Night's Watch had crowded around them. Some tried to rescue the princess, naked steel in their hands, while others only watched.

_I'd looked for the Lady Melisandre but she wasn't there. I thought it was her doing, but how could it be when she was gone before the brothers stormed the Nightfort?_

Whispers could still be heard, Devan said, that Patchface had acted on the command of the red priestess. It was for Jon Snow, they said, who had emerged from Beyond the Wall with his life restored, his wounds scarred over.

 _Do you believe it?_ Edric had asked him. He had no love for the red priestess. She'd urged him to pray to the Lord of Light when Edric prayed only to the Warrior and for that he'd grown suspicious of her. But Lys had been home to one of the largest temples of the Red God, and it was there that he learned more of their creed. He remembered their words. _Only life can pay for life._

Devan had only shrugged and fell silent. _We are but fodder to the gods,_ he said, the trust he put in the Lord of Light had died with Shireen. _I'd promised her years before that we would always be friends. I would never leave her, I said._

He had remained true to his promise. As Shireen burned, Devan watched from the cold patch of ground he was chained to, struggling against his bonds until his wrists bled, biting into his bones. Winter had rattled his lungs, nearly claimed his toes and fingers. Half-delirious with fever, Devan sat there with the rest of the Queen's Men and the brothers loyal to Jon Snow.

He was with her to the end.

 _They killed him afterwards,_ Devan recounted. _They chopped him up and burned him, one limb at a time. He warmed us in the courtyard that night._ He smiled a bitter smile, so unlike the gentle Devan Seaworth that Edric knew. _I'm alive because of him. Because he killed her._

He was made a Baratheon a month after his return, in a quick and unadorned ceremony attended only by the small council and, after much debate between the king and the Hand, the High Septon. Edric Baratheon, Prince of Storm's End alike in title as the Targaryen heirs with Dragonstone. It was better than the fiction in his dreams but it was hollow all the same. Stannis had bestowed him his titles with the solemn bearing of mourning rather than celebration.

At sixteen, he'd thought himself above the petty wants of a child. It was to his great annoyance then that despite what his head told him, his heart still yearned for the approval of his uncle.

In his loneliness, he'd taken up his childhood habit of writing his mother Delena. Though mother and son had not seen each other in nearly a decade, Edric hoped that she would answer him, that she would come to King's Landing with his brothers Alester and Renly, named after the uncles that died for betraying the king while Edric himself had been named after no one.

She answered his letters with only one that was brief and distant. _I'm glad that you are well,_ she had written. _Gladder still that you take your place as a Baratheon. Be a good boy. Be a good king._

The invitation to King's Landing that had not been his to make had gone unanswered. _All the better for it_ , Grand Maester Pylos consoled Edric. The king and the queen would not have allowed the presence of his mother and her family at court. _It's a reminder to the realm, young prince, that you are not the son of King Stannis and Queen Selyse. A reminder best buried for your own good._

Edric would meet them eventually on a progress through the Reach, when he would be welcomed at Brightwater Keep and meet his mother's family for the first time. He would find Delena matronly, almost plain, as she stood next to the lowly knight she wed and the sons they loved. She bore a striking difference from the regal bearing of the queen but for all of that appeared infinitely more content, with all of her toes and her children intact.

 _I don't know what he wants from me_ , he'd confided in Davos.

 _The king is difficult to please_ , Davos had told him, with a smile that said much of the effort of softening his words. Uttered with the wisdom of decades in the king's service. _He'd sooner trust you than love you and trust takes years to build, my prince._

The Lord Hand was a much kinder man than Edric had once thought, as he was free now to know him and the family he brought to King's Landing.

Lady Marya was the kind of mother that Edric always imagined his own to be, easy with her laughter and her praise. Davos' sons became like his own brothers: Devan, his constant companion when Devan didn't guard over the king; Stanny, who didn't have the serious mien of his namesake, quick to smile and eager for adventure; Steffon was more quiet, fond of his books, his two pet dogs forever at his heels.

His lessons had taken up much of his time, with Pylos in the morning, and various members of the small council in the afternoon. Laws with Prince Arianne; martial strategy with the Lord Commander; trade and coin with his uncle Axell Florent; naval battles and shipbuilding with Lady Asha. But at the end of the day, he would always wander into the corner of the Red Keep where the Seaworths made their home. He would stay there for hours, welcomed as though he was one of them.

In the early years, he'd seen very little of the king. Always from a distance, when he sat at court to watch the lords and smallfolk seeking audience; at small council meetings that the king demanded he attend.

 _I've become more Seaworth than Baratheon_ , he'd often thought, yet never had the courage to say. Their exchanges had always been brief, as though Edric was never worth the king's time.

His eighteenth nameday was the start of change. Instead of the festivities Edric had expected of the namedays of highborns, the king brought him along on a progress to the Wall, visiting major holdfasts on the way.

 _My heir, Edric Baratheon, Prince of Storm's End,_ Stannis had called him. Lords bowed to him and pledged their allegiance. _My prince,_ they uttered. _Your Grace._

At White Harbor, he met his betrothed. At Karhold, he was met by The Lord Karstark who accompanied them north. At Winterfell, he supped with the Lord Stark at the high table of the great hall. Beside the king, he stood audience to the wedding of the Lady Sansa and the Lord Karstark, uttering their vows underneath the blood red canopy of the godswood.

At the Wall he broke bread with the bastard that became a lord on his own right, the Lord Commander Jon Snow with the cold fingers of death forever in his eyes, his white wolf forever at his side. When he met the Lady Melisandre, there was no more talk of king's blood, just the hardened steel of a lingering history wielded by his uncle in the few words he cared to share with her.

The castles along the Wall seemed to house half the realm in black. Black in the brotherhood of the Night's Watch and in mourning for the wealth of lands they left in the south. Edric could name only a few of them until they were introduced, naked as they had been of the colored liveries of their houses.

But there was one he knew best, a hero of his childhood. He'd embraced the scarred Ser Loras, whose handsome smile was unrecognizable underneath the scars he bore. Edric remembered the warmth of the squire that lived in Storm's End but when they met again, it was only Ser Garlan that Ser Loras had clutched tightly in his arms and it was only then that Edric saw tears in Ser Garlan's eyes.

He travelled with the king for most of that year, staying for a fortnight at each holdfast. He listened to the complaints of lords, the plight of farmers, and the clamoring of smallfolk.

 _The lords whine,_ Stannis told him, _but it's the smallfolk that truly suffer. You are my heir and so you will learn that a king protects the realm._

 _And the realm is made of more than the wants of lords_ , Edric had said. He would never forget the mix of surprise and pleasure on his uncle's face in that moment.

 _I see your lessons have not gone to waste,_ Stannis had said, nodding his approval.

It had been the first time his uncle ever thrown him a word of praise. He savored it, the bloom of warmth at his breast. _I am his heir in truth_ , Edric had told himself, and since then had worked hard to prove it in his eyes and that of the realm.

 

* * *

 

At last, a long, high-pitched wail broke the silence. It echoed down the corridor, stilling Edric's fretting. The door burst open to reveal Lady Marya, tired but grinning.

"He's here," she said excitedly. "Come, Edric. Your son has arrived."

For all of his waiting, Edric, in the end, was slow to move his feet. Andrew and Devan cast him looks of happiness, laughing as he seemed to sway where he stood in the middle of the corridor.

"You're a father, cousin," Andrew said, clutching his shoulders and steering him to the door.

Even Ser Garlan looked pleased, a smile softening his usually stern face. "My congratulations, Your Grace," he said, ever courteous, but Edric knew that he meant it.

"The fearless Prince Edric is terrified by a newborn babe," Devan laughed, not unkindly.

"Oh shush, Devan," Lady Marya said to her son. He held onto his arm, her gentle touch belying her stern reprimand. Devan only looked sheepish.

"And my wife, is she well?" Edric asked, his head swimming.

"Ask her yourself!" came Wylla's shout from inside the room, contending with the cries of their son-- _their son!_ "Get in here you great coward!"

With a laugh, Lady Marya took his hands and pushed him into the room. "A husband does not keep his wife waiting."

And so he didn't. Edric took a breath, steeled himself, and marched into the room where his family waited for him.


	6. Edric Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fluff? Fluff. Second to the last chapter woohoo almost there.

**(312 AC)**

 

It was high noon when a healthy baby boy, black of hair like his father and his father's father before him, third in line to the Iron Throne, was pulled into the world amidst the din of high-pitched cries behind closed doors.

The sun hid behind the thick clouds of winter, but the babe cried as though it bore the spirit of summer itself, howling louder than the cold winds that brayed the walls of the Red Keep on that tenth year of the Long Night.

Stannis Baratheon, First of His Name, received the news as he sat upon the throne. The bells rang from high above the parapets: three tolls for every beat for a prince; four for a princess. The king remained silent, unmoving even as the hall erupted into a quaking sea of excited whispers.

Beside him, the Lord Hand was the very picture of a proud father—as he had some right to be, perhaps more so than Stannis. Davos had always been close to the boy: an able counsellor now that Edric was a man grown; a sympathetic ear when Edric had first come to King's Landing.

"Your Grace," Grazdan zo Galare shouted over the ruckus. "Allow me to be the first to express my congratulations on the birth of the new heir to the Seven Kingdoms." He bowed low. The gold around his wrists clicked loudly as he moved. "I will tell the Mother of Dragons herself of this joyous news."

Stannis received the pledge with a terse nod. He moved to resume court when the Lord Bar Emmon spoke up as well to pledge his allegiance, and bowed just as low as the Meereneese noble.

It wasn't long before the entire room, lords and ladies and smallfolk alike, bowed low and bent their knees to the newborn babe.

The Prince of Storm's End entered the hall in a loud slam of the double doors at the far end of the hall, breaking the silence that rested on their heads.

"Uncle," Edric called out to him. "Your Grace," he added shortly, remembering himself. He was panting heavily, as though he'd run the entire way. It was very likely that he did. He was the very picture of Robert in his twenty-five years: tall and handsome, grinning widely, eyes alight in joy. "I have a son."

Edric stopped at the foot of the throne, maintaining the distance that had always lain between him and his uncle. Stannis knew it was only respect that kept him from bounding up the steps.

When Stannis didn't speak right away, Davos spoke for him.

"What is the young prince's name, my lord?" Davos said, the smile that must be writ on his face told plainly in the excited rush of his words.

Edric looked at his uncle. "Stannis," he said. "His name is Stannis."

The throne room erupted into applause and cheers of _Stannis! Stannis! Long live the prince!_ Beside him, Davos cheered as well and went down the steps to congratulate Edric with a quick embrace. But Edric kept his eyes on his uncle, expecting… _something_.

Stannis did not speak and felt only a great hollow in his gut. All of a sudden he became aware of the many fused swords he sat on, the sharp edges surrounding his fingers as his arms rested lightly on the thousand other swords that threatened to bite through cloth and hauberk. The throne that demanded blood to hold it together.

In the end, he offered only a deep bow of his head to Edric, though his eyes never lowered. It was enough. Edric’s grin widened, and he turned to face the room with answering cheers of his own.

The scene was as a tapestry would have the scene woven into history some decades after: the King of the Long Night in his plain crown, the Lord Seaworth stood at his left, the Prince of Storm's End at the foot of the throne, facing a realm on its knees. _House Baratheon at the Birth of Stannis II_ , it would be titled; a vast sweep of fine, handwoven Myrish craft commissioned by a young emperor of New Valyria, a patron of the finest arts that would display the history of the Seven Kingdoms and the Free Cities alike in the halls of the Great Pyramid.

It would be the only tapestry commemorating the occasion.

Others would come years after the return of spring: of Stannis I on his funeral bed, stones on his eyes, surrounded by his seven knights; of Stannis II and his royal siblings in various scenes of their youth; of Edric I ascending to the throne with Queen Wylla at his side; of The Last Dragon's Landing outside the city, on the sprawling, verdant fields of the long awaited summer, Daenerys Stormborn astride Drogon, and her children Rhaenys and Rhaenyra on Viserion and Rhaegal; but of the future king's birth, there would only be one, showing much of the austerity of the Long Night.

When Joffrey was born, tourneys, feasts, and mummer's shows lit up the streets of King's Landing for as long as summer itself, it had seemed at the time. _Long live the prince!_ They had shouted then, as they shouted it now. If Joffrey had lived and continued his line, then there would be tapestries, paintings, and sculptures depicting all manners of celebration at the birth of his heir.

But there would be no tourneys for Edric's son. No tourneys, feasts, and mummer's shows. Stannis would not allow them. The Long Night had yet to end. Even now the days remained dark. The sun's reach did not touch the Seven Kingdoms. Farmlands remained frozen, their farmers hard at work to feed the realm. Grain never enough and the Iron Bank was quickly growing tired of lending coin for something as lowly as bread.

Dragons had been sighted more frequently in the north. A regular occurrence that once struck the northerners in awe turned into an omen of the rise of the Others. The Night's Watch wrote to him of fires that engulfed forests beyond the Wall. Fires that brightened the night sky as though the Long Night had turned the manner of day and brought the sun from day to flourish in the dark of the evening.

Stannis knew of the black and red of Drogon, the queen's mount when she last came to Westeros. At times, however, the Night's Watch wrote of other dragons that bore different colors. _Viserion and Rhaegal._ Messengers from the Free Cities told him of their names. Of the three, only Drogon had ventured as far south as King's Landing. His wings blotted out the sparse light of day. Stannis often watched as he glided through the sky, never once touching land.

_Dragons fly in the east_.

Maesters of Oldtown explained that dragons must know when the Great Other was abound, but they never trusted the writs of R'hllor, nor the red priests that assured that this was indeed so.

As long as dragons flew high above his head, Stannis knew that the Long Night was still upon them. The castellan of Dragonstone would write of dragons flying over the holdfast. There, they never unleashed their fire.

_The dragons rest,_ wrote Ser Erren Florent, the queen's brother upon whom fell the stewardship of the lordless keep of Dragonstone.

_They perch upon the ramparts; fly high above the volcano. They skirt the waters of the Narrow Sea within sight of the walls. They never breathe their fire, and they always come alone never all three at the same time._

  

* * *

 

The afternoon was a swathe of dull red in the dark sky when Stannis met Edric in his nephew's solar. The new father was abound with restless energy. He kept to his feet even as he pored over the parchments on his desk, detailed plans for the construction of a new nursery. Hundreds upon hundreds of ravens from across the realm bearing the many sigils--both loyal and reluctantly so--expressing their congratulations at the news.

Edric stilled, however, when Stannis entered the solar. Ser Devan remained outside, no doubt to chat with Ser Andrew as he was wont to do. Both knights of the Kingsguard knew they didn't need to guard over their respective charges when they were alone.

"Stannis Baratheon," Stannis said, the name awkward on his tongue. He seldom uttered his own name. The only other person that bore it, Stannis Seaworth, had always been "Stanny" for the Lord Hand, "your son" whenever Stannis referred to him in conversation with Davos, and Lord Seaworth when he would take the title at the passing of his father.

Edric nodded, still grinning. It seemed as though the boy had yet to cease smiling since his son's birth. It faltered now as he braced for his uncle's reaction.

"Do you mean to flatter me, nephew?" Stannis asked, his eyes shrewd.

Edric's face fell, and hurt flashed in his eyes. "No, uncle, I would never," he said in earnest, lowering himself in his chair. "I know better than to flatter you."

"Half the council expected you to name the babe after your father." _The babe_ , Stannis thought. _Stannis, Prince of Storm_ _’_ _s End._ The twist of fortune—or perhaps Edric’s sentimentality—had it that his namesake would hold the keep that Stannis had once lost to Renly. The infant prince Stannis, armed with the birthright of a firstborn.

Edric smiled a shade less bright than his usual. Stannis noticed that it was the smile he best reserved for any mention of Robert--a fondness lay in the act, yet tinged with sadness all the same.

"Everyone knows I'm Robert's son," Edric began slowly, mulling over the words like an Arbor vintage unknown to him.

_And all vintages must be unknown to him_ , Stannis mused. The boy took after his uncle in that manner, or perhaps only disavowed the drink because Stannis looked unkindly upon people of excesses.

"But they must remember that I am _your_ heir." He hurried to correct himself, lest it sounded like an insult. "The realm knows that I will be king after you, but they must know it in their hearts. I will sit your throne, uncle, as the heir of Stannis of the House Baratheon. Not Robert's."

It never occurred to him that Edric, born a Storm now raised to the Baratheon name, wearing Robert's face and singing Robert's praises during his wide-eyed youth, would ever truly _know_ Stannis. Yet here he was, proving his uncle wrong.

He felt a surge of pride in the boy perhaps for the first time since he first laid eyes on him as a squalling babe, a taint on his wife's honor. The babe beget in such a dishonorable way, born on the wrong side of the sheets, ignored by his father and even more so by his uncles as he grew up in the tutelage of maesters, septons, and masters-at-arms that gave him the proper tools for a highborn bastard but never prepared him for anything more than that. Now he was to be king, and Stannis almost felt the barb of guilt that at some point in the boy's life he was almost fodder to the flames of a god that, in the end, did Stannis no service.

_She saved him, but she didn't save our daughter_. Her wife's screams echoed in his ears. It'd been ten years since Shireen's death but Stannis had yet to see her well and whole in the dreams that plagued him at night.

Edric waited for his affirmation. Kind words from the only family Edric had left, that Edric always hungered for, or so Davos told him. He saw it in the boy's face now. Though a man grown, his trimmed beard a thick black on his square jaw, his eyes shrewd when they needed to be, he sat as though he was a child again waiting for a warm welcome from his uncle upon his return from Lys.

But Stannis did not greet him warmly then, and he deprived him of the reward now. He was not capable of it, the King of the Long Night, that whispers in the court often joked that he emerged from the northern winters unchanged. He had always been cold, they said. What difference did it make if he was as frigid now when he'd won his throne?

"Your wife, is she well?" Stannis asked instead.

"She's tired, but she's happy. She's nursing the child now. She adores him," Edric smiled as though the fondness between the two was a secret them when, in truth, it hardly was. Edric was as fond of Wylla as she was of him, the way summer children were shameless in their happiness.

"Are you displeased with me, uncle?" Edric asked, breaching the subject once more.

"Why should I be? You have made an heir to secure the line of succession," Stannis replied. "You don't need to win any more favors from me."

"I’ve never won _any_ favors from you," Edric said, but not for want to complain. He spoke with the honesty that Stannis always told him to carry in his every manner.

_The truth and the law are different things_ , he remembered telling the boy in one of the small council meetings compelled him to attend. _But to maintain the law is to maintain order._

Stannis sat on a throne of fallen swords. It was hard to forget the threat of it coming undone at the slightest mistake. What was fused there by dragonfire would be _kept_ there by law as iron-willed as the throne that made it so.

"You are not my son," Stannis began, confident in the certainty of his words. Edric knew the little patience he had for courtesies. "You're proof of the shame Robert once dealt me. It was not the last of its kind but it was one of the worst. My wife and I were in agreement that you ought never come to Dragonstone or Brightwater Keep."

Edric took the unsympathetic words that Stannis gave him with the dignity of a man that was prepared for the consequences of his wants.

"There are very few places in this world where bastards are welcome," he said, recalling Jon Snow's own conflict with his name when Stannis offered him the legitimacy of a Stark. A lifetime ago, it seemed now. "Some have died for the thankless blood they carried; some rose to greatness despite of it."

"When I lost Shireen," Stannis swallowed. Her name never failed to hurt him. "I lost half of my kingdom. What is a king without an heir, they asked me. I was afraid that war would ravage the realm again, even as Daenerys Targaryen returned to Essos in the wake of a thousand ravens flying to every holdfast and stronghold in the kingdom proclaiming her support for my claim."

A thousand more ravens had flown back to King's Landing for months after. The ravens from the Crownlands were some of the last, bearing the sigils that once rode alongside the dragon. But Stannis knew he would not be king for long if the Iron Throne would stand empty after his passing.

It was Davos himself, clothed in the livery befitting the Hand of the King, took _Lord Steffon_ out to sea to bring back the boy he'd secreted out of Dragonstone years before.

"I did not love you then. As you stood before me, tall and hale, I felt only anger," Stannis confessed. "The gods jape cruelly once again, that Robert's bastard son would be my heir while my daughter is dead before her time."

Edric dipped his head. Stannis knew he had loved Shireen. For a short while they were as cousins, taking their lessons and playing in Dragonstone. The boy Stannis had come to know was always in danger of loving too deeply, starved as he was from the family he yearned. For Shireen he kept a place in his heart—for the cousin he found at long last and the friend that she had become.

"You don't listen to the gods, uncle," Edric cared to point out. The echoes of mourning darkened his eyes despite the humor in his voice.

His nephew observed the rites and rituals of the religions that now crowded King's Landing: the godswood now restored within the walls of the Red Keep; the newly constructed temple of the Lord of Light near the ruins of the Dragonpit; the unbending Seven-Pointed Star in the Sept of Baelor; the stretch of sand on the banks of the Blackwater for the Drowned God at the counsel of Lady Asha. _To remind the ironborn of their place in the Seven Kingdoms,_ she'd spoke of her querulous people. Edric attended each and every one that required the presence of the king, and said the words that Stannis refused.

_I detest gods_ , he once told Edric, when the child had stubbornly proclaimed the Seven were the only gods he knew. _But I never underestimate the power of the people who act in their name. Even as the gods preach mercy in their letters, people act as people are wont to do. With or without the wisdom of their gods._

"When I was in want of an heir, I listened to the small council," said Stannis. "Selyse remains to be my queen, but I will not replace her for another to make an heir of my own. I listened to the Lord Hand when he proposed your return. When you came to King's Landing, I listened to him still."

Edric smiled at the mention of Davos. The Lord Hand that had once been like a father to Shireen was now like a father to the boy in her stead. Stannis was not deaf to the whispers that Davos was not the King's Hand but the King's Heart, acting in kindness when his liege lord spoke without care for it.

"If I had trusted the gods more than I trusted his counsel, I would have let Melisandre burn you as a boy," Stannis said. "And perhaps I would have, had he not betrayed me for your sake."

As expected, Edric did not react with surprise. Stannis knew Davos had told him the truth of it, when the pouting boy that had demanded his love suddenly ceased to do. When Edric began looking to his uncle with the sober understanding of bitter truths.

"He saved you," Stannis continued. "He would say that he saved you from her but in truth he saved you from me, from my own folly."

"And, as it turns out, Davos saved the realm," Edric dared to joke, but not unkindly. "Who would have been your heir then, uncle?"

Stannis did not smile, but years had taught Edric, Davos, the small council, and everyone that surrounded the king that Stannis showed his approval in other ways. Edric must have seen what he needed to as he eased his manner and sighed a deep tremor of relief in his gut.

"I don't think highly of luck," Stannis said, "and I would thank no gods for my fortunes... but I'm pleased with the man you have become. Davos bent your ear and Pylos taught you well, but in the end you are your own man."

Edric's eyes widened then, and he grew still. _I could still surprise you after all_ , Stannis mused, and not without some warmth.

It was not out of sentiment that he doled his praise. The boy had been raised by the wrath of lords as much as he had been by the wisdom of the small council. Under heavy fire, he flourished like the steel that Robert had once promised to be yet failed to become.

When the yearly harvest of swords for the Wall threatened an uprising of lords, it was the boy that recalled the aborted legacy of Jon Arryn to conduct a Great Council of the different Wardens to foster good relations between the throne and its vassals. Hosted every two years, a different house each time. Edric sat to his right as Stannis listened to the concerns of his Wardens, often speaking on behalf of their vassal houses.

Stannis had yet to see the effects of such a practice but whatever rebellion brewed among the discontent had been kept at bay and Edric quickly gained the respect of the realm.

"You have the manner of my brothers as they had been in their prime. Beloved by the people as they had been. But you've showed me more loyalty than they ever did. I don't know if you'll be a good king, nephew, but I hope that you will be," Stannis said. _And that is the truth of it._

Edric swallowed, emotion in his eyes. "I promise you, uncle."

Stannis snorted. "Words are wind, as you know. Only time will tell if you make good on your intentions."

Edric smiled, expecting nothing else from his uncle. "Would you like to see him?" His smile faltered as he grew nervous and eager at the same time.

After a pause, Stannis nodded, and it was all he could do as he watched Edric bound out of his chair in relief. _I'll have doomed the Seven Kingdoms to a puppy for a king_ , Stannis mused but followed Edric all the same.

 

* * *

 

The heir to the Iron Throne was not the squalling babe Stannis had dreaded, but an infant deep in slumber, snuggled close to his mother's side. A pink, wrinkled ball of a thing wrapped loosely in thin blankets and Wylla's arms.

"Your Grace," Wylla greeted him in a whisper, a smile on her face. Her good humor matched the vivid green of her hair despite the shadows underneath her eyes.

She was not alone. At her bedside was Selyse, sat in her wheeled chair, with a small blanket covering her legs. Stannis glanced at her, expecting the usual sternness with which she greeted Wylla the Willful, as she liked to call their nephew's wife, but saw only tenderness there.

"Husband," Selyse greeted her with a nod, answered by Stannis with one of his own.

Edric had wandered to the other side of her bed, sitting close to his wife and child. Meanwhile, Stannis stood tall as was his manner in court, a figure out of place at the foot of the bed.

The memory of Shireen's birth came unbidden. His wife had not been so cheerful after her difficult birth. He'd first laid eyes on Shireen in a cradle by his wife's bed; Selyse had been exhausted, lulled to sleep by milk of the poppy. She labored for a day and a night, Maester Cressen and a number of maidservants assembled in the room as though preparing for battle. After failed births and miscarriages, both Stannis and Selyse had braced for the worst. When Shireen finally came, Stannis had thought her lost to him as well, silent as she was and smaller than she should have been. When Cressen coaxed her first lungful of breath and the cry that followed it, Stannis had grown weak with relief. _At last_ , he'd thought then. _A child at last._

"Wylla tells me they've named the child after you," Selyse told him, keeping her voice low.

The king snorted. "Her husband is a sentimental fool."

Edric had the grace to gape as Wylla chuckled. To her credit, Selyse had the generosity to appear indulgent, the most warmth she could express to her nephew. The queen and the princess hardly agreed on many things—Wylla's hair to start with—but in the criticism of their respective husbands they had the great misfortune of agreeing immensely.

Edric hurried to defend himself. "It was an act of—"

Stannis gestured impatiently. "I know what you said," he told his nephew, not unkindly. "An honor that flatters me but it's not without its merits."

"Would you like to hold him, Your Grace?" asked Wylla, looking first at Selyse then Stannis. Neither moved, as though the offer was too generous to be trusted (Stannis) or too much of a surprise for an immediate response (Selyse).

It was Selyse who stirred first. She held out her hands and Wylla gently placed the child in her arms.

Selyse made a soft noise under her breath, an _Oh!_ quickly stifled by too much memory. Stannis watched as his wife held the child, gingerly at first then growing more confident as the bundle settled in her arms without waking.

"He's beautiful," Selyse whispered. She caressed the child's cheek with the knuckles of her three-fingered hand, appearing as fragile as the babe she carried.

Selyse looked up at Stannis with something like a smile on her face. Tears pricked at her eyes.

"You have an heir, my lord," she said to him, her voice trembling.

Stannis approached her, his steps clipped as they often were. He stood over his wife and the new heir to his throne, unbending even as the sight begged for his softness. His hand rested on Selyse's shoulder as he looked over and saw for his own eyes what the Long Night had took from him, and what it gave back.

There was no greyscale marring this child's face, only the peace of a deep slumber.


	7. Shireen Baratheon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND IT'S DONE. IT'S FINISHED. thank you guys for reading! i hope you had as much fun as i did writing this. :D
> 
> this chapter is set, like, 20 years into the future which means stannis is around 58 years old in this chapter. like, i've followed book stannis' age and characterization even though my mental image as i write this fic is of show!stannis. i've realized that a future fic set 20 years since the events of adwd/twow has book!stannis basically the same age as stephen dillane in season 5 lmao i'm amazed by this, ok. stephen dillane is immortal.

**(322 AC)**

 

The quick patter of footsteps echoed in the silent hall. It was late in the evening, the fires burned low from the sconces along the walls. Shadows played on old, aged stone.

A girl whispered, insistent. "I already told you, Ned, the dragons are _here._ "

"But I don't want to go there. I can't see _anything_ ," the boy Ned, named by their mother after the Lord Stark's father, answered in a long, drawn-out whine of a child woken abruptly from his deep slumber. His small hands clutched at the girl's dress, much to her annoyance.

The two children were deep in the belly of the Red Keep. They never wandered so far without their septa or Ser Richard, their sworn sword. For this attempt, they had had to conspire with Stannis.

 _Ser Richard_ , the boy had called over from his chamber. _There's... um... something weird here_... _in... my... wardrobe? No, out the window! It's a dragon, Ser Richard, come quick!_

The children had stifled their giggles into their fists as their older brother did all the work for them. Stannis was ever so indulgent with his siblings, and he never missed an opportunity to trick the knights that shadowed him. Much to the misfortune of the Kingsguard.

 _You'll stop this nonsense,_ the king once told him, heavily reprimanding the boy in front of his siblings. _The guards will do their duty as you will do yours._

 _I'm a child, grand-uncle,_ the boy Stannis had groused. _My duty is to play._

The insolence was not often tolerated by their father and their grand-uncle was ever sternerthan the prince. Shireen had feared that her brother would live out his days in the dungeons. _Then I would be queen_ , she thought, at once horrified and stunned by the idea.

 _Young princesses do not get dirty_ , her grand-aunt said so. Queen Selyse with her regal bearing, clicking her tongue as Shireen was once again dragged into her solar, her hair caked with dirt.

Oftentimes she was terrified of them, the king and the queen. They weren't like Lord Davos, who chuckled at her antics when the king was not there to reprimand both of them. Or Lady Marya, who embraced her often and brushed her hair, tutting at Shireen's wishes of dying it green as her mother once colored hers. _Your hair is beautiful the way it is_ , Lady Marya would say, _But red would suit you better, I think._

"We're almost there," Shireen whispered to Ned. She didn't know why she tried to keep quiet. Nobody else kept quarters in this part of the Red Keep.

They reached the small oak door that led to the underbellies of the Keep. She'd heard tell from the servants that dragons were kept there. Balerion the Black Dread, Meraxes, Vhagar, and all their siblings, lying in wait for worthy dragonriders.

Shireen could count the few times she'd seen Daenerys Targaryen's dragons for herself. Grand Maester Pylos said that they used to fly more frequently in the realm but of late, they rarely did.

The first time she saw a dragon was when Drogon flew low enough that his wing almost touched her window. She'd barely caught sight of his tail until he soared too high above the clouds and she didn't see him again. Another time on a progress north with her father. The Lord Stark's direwolf howled at the sky. She'd looked up then and saw another dragon, _Viserion_ , her father said, flying high above them. A shadow in a field of winter grey.

The third time--her favorite memory thus far--was on her sixth nameday. Her parents had journeyed east to Dragonstone and brought only her with them. It was a rare occasion that Shireen got her parents all to herself. Often it was Stannis, dragged to this holdfast and that holdfast, as their father's heir. Her brother was ever so tired of it and often complained that his siblings never had to be so burdened.

It was the first time she'd ever been to Dragonstone. It was a monstrous thing that rent the sky, almost ghastly. The stone was a deep black that hurt her feet when sharp edges bit through the thick soles of her shoes.

Inside, it was even darker despite the numerous sconces that lit the halls. There she met Ser Alyn Florent, the new castellan of Dragonstone after the passing of his father Ser Erren. _Dragonstone is yours, Your Grade_ , Ser Alyn had greeted her father, bending the knee.

The family stayed there for a fortnight. Her father and mother spent much of it in the Room of the Painted Table, discussing boring things with lords that sailed from other parts of the Crownlands to seek audience with the Prince.

 _You've gotten quite big, haven't you?_ said Lord Monterys with a kind smile. Shireen liked him; he smiled easy and when he laughed he did so with all of his jowls aquiver. _Why, you're almost at the age of my son Monford._

Shireen had frowned. She didn't like Monford. He sniffled too much and grimaced in disgust when she had showed him a litter of puppies in the Red Keep. She _liked_ puppies.

Wylla had barely restrained a sigh _,_ quick as she was to show her happiness as much as her displeasure. _There would be a proper time to talk of these things, my lord._

Shireen didn't know what they were talking about but Monterys only shrugged, his great barrel of a torso moving tightly under his cloak. _My boy is a good lad, my lady. I mean to send him to King's Landing, to squire for your lord husband. Perhaps the princess would..._ he trailed off as Wylla ushered him along, impatient with his prattle.

Shireen soon found that the trip to Dragonstone wasn't going to be as interesting as Shireen had hoped. Sitting beside her father as he spoke to the lords of the Crownlands, she soon grew bored and disinterested, preferring instead to explore the keep as her parents kept busy with "Lord and Lady Things," or so her brother called them. Ser Garlan had shadowed her footsteps, often driven to the last of his patience as she flitted in and out of hallways, disappeared around corners, and wandered into dark rooms and even darker wardrobes.

One of Shireen's great finds had been a balcony that looked out to the Narrow Sea. From there she saw that the sea was a vast shade of dark blue, frothing in an angry roar as it ravaged the foot of the stronghold. It reminded her of Shipbreaker Bay but more vicious, somehow, as though Dragonstone would fall into the sea at every battering wave that knocked on its doors.

 _Don't lean too far, Princess_ , Ser Garlan warned her. Shireen had sighed and _sprawled_ on the stone bannister instead, her feet akimbo on the floor and her arms splayed out on the bannister.

She heard Ser Garland’s sigh behind her shoulder but he didn't reprimand her again. She guessed that he was only relieved that Shireen found another nook where she could while away the time.

 _I'm so bored!_ she'd shouted at the sky. She hated that the only time she got to spend with her parents turned out to be an idle, mindless business with _other_ people. This was supposed to be her _nameday_ _gift._

Just then, a great thunderous roar filled the clouds. Startled, she leaned forward to peer past the stone balustrade. She thought a giant rock had fallen into the sea, but the froth remained unbroken.

A great wind whipped her long black hair into her face. She cried out, stumbling back. Ser Garlan caught her before she fell, steadying her on her feet.

 _Look, princess. A dragon_ , Ser Garlan said. Even the Gallant had not been spared the awe at the sight, it seemed.

She quickly brushed her hair from her face. _Where? Where's the dragon? Where is it?_

And there he was, Drogon the great black dragon everyone said to be Balerion the Black Dread come again. It hovered close to the balcony but Shireen only saw it from its side. Drogon's skin was leathery, like the scales of armor along Ser Garlan’s arms but black where the armor was white. Its wings flapped mightily, slowly, as though the cold winds themselves came from them.

 _Princess!_ Ser Andrew called out behind her. He'd come running from her father's side, his armor a loud clang of metal on metal as he slowed to a stop. _The Prince calls for you._

 _But the dragon--_ she'd sputtered. Ser Andrew shook his head and she knew the conversation was over. Sullenly, she followed him to the Room of the Painted Table.

Her father met her at the door. He held her shoulders and steered her to the direction of the large window that opened out to the sea.

There it was again. Drogon. Its grand head barely visible in its entirety. Shireen gasped, at once scared and awed. She burrowed into her father's side, clutching the hands at her shoulders.

 _Beautiful, isn't he?_ said another voice. Shireen turned to find a lady she'd never met before, dressed in riding leathers, her long silver hair falling into a braid over her shoulder.

 _Y-yes,_ Shireen had replied, looking to her father for guidance. Strangers were often introduced _to_ her, and so she always knew their names, their titles, and the manner by which they ought to be greeted before she was expected to converse.

 _My daughter, Your Grace,_ Edric told the lady. _Shireen of the House Baratheon._

Shireen had curtsied, albeit awkwardly. The woman smiled, her eyes kind as she approached her. She knelt to look her in the eye.

 _Come, sweetling._ The woman smiled at her. _Princess Shireen._ The woman brushed her tangled hair, dark and black against her fair skin. _A fawn has come to Dragonstone._

Daenerys Stormborn, Mother of Dragons, had taken her hand when she rose to her feet and led her to Drogon. The great flap of his wings from so close nearly deafened her. For a moment, Shireen thought Drogon might eat him, but he did nothing with the razor sharp teeth in his mouth.

Shireen stared at the dragon and a great happiness blossomed in her breast. _Hello_ , she'd said with a grin, her fears shaking free from her curiosity. _Drogon._

Daenerys had stayed for a night and a day. Shireen had sat at her father's right, peering over the edge of the Table, though she'd much rather venture outside and play with the dragon. _Dragons don't play, princess_ , Daenerys had said with a laugh.

She was bored for most of it, but she watched with some fascination as Edric and Daenerys discussed matters of the Seven Kingdoms, of the New Valyria that now rose in the Free Cities, the trouble brewing in Qarth, the booming trade in Lys, the politics of Braavos... names and names of places and things that Shireen couldn't pronounce just yet.

She'd flown to King's Landing first, she said, and met with the king there. The first time a dragon had landed at King's Landing in _years_ and Shireen hadn't been there to see it. Stannis told her all about it when she came back. The banners of House Baratheon accompanied that of House Targaryen; the crowned stag and the three-headed dragon side by side, flying from the ramparts and towers of the Red Keep.

 _You should've seen it, sister_ , Stannis had said. _Drogon was huge and I got to fly him._

Shireen had gaped at him. _You lie! You little monster!_ The king would _never_ have allowed him to do anything so dangerous. Stannis had laughed as he dodged the pillow Shireen threw at his head.

Stannis didn't ride the dragon, it turned out in the end. Shireen had asked the king himself and the king _never_ lied. _I wanted to, though,_ Stannis told her when she confronted her brother about it, armed with a pillow of her own. With a sigh, Shireen had to admit that she did too, but she let fly at his head anyway and left the room laughing as hard as Stannis had done.

It was after that visit that Shireen learned she was Princess of Dragonstone, a title that had been vacant for years since the heir to the Iron Throne took the title of Storm's End instead.

 _Does that mean I have to be queen, father?_ Shireen had asked, her nose scrunched in distaste.

Edric had chuckled, shaking his head. It was as the king decided, with the permission of the Mother of Dragons. Dragonstone could not always be in the hands of castellans, and the king would not bestow it on the many lordlings that vied for the seat.

And so it was that the secondborn of the heir would sit the stronghold in the name of the dragons in the east. When her brother Stannis became king, Second of His Name, Storm's End would fall to his heir and Dragonstone to his second child.

 _I won't be a princess anymore, then?_ Shireen wondered. _You will always be a princess, Shireen_ , her father had reassured her, kissing her brow. _From now till the end of your days._

The Princess of Dragonstone wandered into the dark now to find the so-called dragons in the Keep. She'd expected the grandness of Drogon, flapping his wings. She'd wondered why the Red Keep stood so tall, unshaken by the thunder of a dragon taking flight within its walls.

"Sis, please," Ned sniffled, tugging more insistently at her dress. "I don't like it here."

At the last of her wits, Shireen pushed him away. "Oh, grow up, Ned!" she shouted at him. He stumbled back, nearly losing his footing. She almost felt bad, guilt warring with her anger, until Ned let out a long, terrible wail.

"You pushed me!" Ned shouted, more insulted than hurt. "Father said you're not supposed to _push me!_ "

Shireen matched his shouts with hers. "Cry all you want, you--you're such a--you're--"

"What's going on here?" A thunderous voice echoed in the walls. The children jumped at the sound. For a moment, Shireen thought it was the dragon itself, angered by their noise.

It was the king, three of the Kingsguard trailing behind him. He held a torch in his hand, the light playing shadows on his tall figure. Even dressed down to his robes, his head free of his crown, he appeared the towering, imposing man that the bards sang of in their songs.

Ned rushed to Shireen's side, clutching at her dress. He was trembling now, hiccupping as the sobs bubbled in his throat.

Shireen was afraid of her grand-uncle but she didn't _tremble_. At eight years old, she was too old to shake in her shoes. _A Princess stands with pride_ , the Princess Arianne once said to her, smiling as Shireen attempted this stance that Arianne instructed. It had looked silly and Shireen flushed red in embarrassment. She hoped she didn't look foolish now. The king had no patience for foolishness.

"Oh gods be good, there you are," said Ser Richard Horpe, standing behind the king. Sweat beaded the knight's brow, his face flushed.

The king silenced him with a glance and he fell back alongside Ser Devan and Ser Rolland. They did not don their helms. Shireen saw the worry on their faces, plain for her to see.

 _Oh, look at what you've done you big oaf_ , she thought guiltily.

The king looked at her then at Ned. With a long, drawn-out breath, he gestured at her brother.

Ned, barely containing his sobs, obeyed and approached him. "I'm sorry, grand-uncle. I'm sorry I was noisy." His breath jumped as hiccups broke through the tremors in his voice. "I'm-- _hic_ \--I'm sorry, don't tell mother. She promised I would--I would go hawking with her tomorrow."

The king looked down at him, his dour face softening somewhat. Shireen thought it was a trick of the light but when the torch shifted in the king's hand, his stern face appeared not as stern as before.

"Devan," he said over his shoulder. "Bring Eddard to his room."

"You won't tell mother, will you? Grand-uncle?" Ned insisted, even as Devan scooped him up in his arms and carried him away. "Grand-uncle-- _hic--_ promise!"

The king sighed again but nodded all the same, a slight tilt of his head that Shireen barely saw.

"I won't tell your mother," the king relented. Ned's face broke into a watery grin, cheerful now depsite the _hics_ that spilled from his throat. "Your father might, but I won't. Now, to bed with you," the king said gruffly.

"Yes, Your Grace," Ned said sullenly, though both of the children knew that the battle was all but won. The Prince of Storm's End could be stricter than their mother but when it came to reporting their misdeeds, their father often kept his tongue. One parent's ire was punishment enough, Lord Davos would say of Edric and Wylla, that the two rarely disciplined their children together. _And be thankful for it_ , Lord Davos had mused with a laugh.

 _You damned rat_ , Shireen thought fondly of her younger brother. Ned knew how to worm his way out of the king's foul temper. It always boggled Stannis and Shireen how their brother seemed to manage it. When they asked him, Ned had only shrugged. _I'm adorable_ , he'd said, sticking out his tongue.

Well, he was a wet sop of a rat now, his cheeks still wet with tears. Not quite as adorable, Shireen thought, but he must be capable of _some_ sorcery that the king would give him a brief pat on the head as he passed.

"I'm," Shireen piped up. Her feet scuffed the floor. "I'm sorry too, grand-uncle."

The light shifted as the king approached her. The torch in his hand hovered close to his face that Shireen saw how displeased he was. She cringed. She courted trouble but unlike Stannis, she did so for a _reason_. Or so she kept telling her parents.

"Don't lie to me," the king said. "Don't apologize when you mean to break your word again."

Shireen gaped at him. _I already_ said _sorry!_ "I don't mean to--" It was her pride that spoke, not her remorse.

"Yes you do," the king huffed. "One of these days you'll wander too far from the Kingsguard and walk into danger, all because you're curious about some trifle or other."

 _That's not true_ , she wanted to say. _I'm always careful._ But in the end she just bit her lip, sighed, and admitted her defeat. "I just wanted to see the dragons, grand-uncle."

"There are no dragons here, child," the king said. "A dragon has not been seen in the Seven Kingdoms for almost a year now."

Her father told her so but she'd refused to believe it. _Daenerys will come again_ , she'd told him. _She'll bring Drogon and Viserion and Rhaegal and they'll fly over King's Landing. Mayhap she'll even let me ride one of them._

Tears pricked at her eyes. She sniffed. She just wanted to see a dragon again. Soon, she found herself crying and she was angry that she was. Shireen hated crying. It was an ugly affair, with snot all over her nose, her face flushed like a ripe plum. _I'm a princess_ , she thought angrily. _A princess is not a plum._

"Come, then," the king said, and passed her by as he walked to the door. It seemed a heavy thing, that door. With its rusted hinges and the dust and spiderwebs lodged in the cracks on the grain.

Without a word, the king passed her the torch. She held it in both of her hands.

"Keep it high and steady," the king instructed.

Behind her, the brief rustle of chainmail and armor. "Your Grace, we should--"

The king grunted in annoyance. He was fifty-eight on his next nameday. The oldest person Shireen knew besides Lord Davos who often poked fun at the creak in his joints and the white in his hair. Her father often warned the king of tiresome activities but the king had insisted. _What's so tiresome about holding court?_

But Edric had not meant that, and the king knew it. Until now, the king insisted on attending Great Councils himself. On the trip north, the king went with them, but he travelled even _farther_ north, to the young towns and new holdfasts along Brandon's Gift, and even farther _farther_ north to the Wall. He had yet to return when Edric and his family arrived at King's Landing. He was gone for so long that Shireen half-expected a wight in his place.

He had taken ill not long after that, ravaged by fever and a wracking cough that kept him from holding court for nearly a month. Shireen feared he would die, but never thought to say so. Her father had worried enough for both of them.

The door creaked as the king pulled it open. Not without great effort, as the door seemed as heavy as it looked. It was high enough that the king didn't have to stoop to enter. Shireen looked into the darkness beyond. She shivered. Ned was right; it was too dark down there.

"Bring the light," the king said to her. Reluctantly, she did as she was told.

Soon enough, the gaping maw of darkness withered away to reveal a large chamber peopled with... with things. Dead things. Not dragons. She stood there beside her grand-uncle and felt as small as she was. With the torch held so low in her hands, large shadows danced on the stone walls.

When her eyes had adjusted in the dim light, she found that she was wrong. They _were_ dragons. But they were dead things as well. A welling sadness engulfed her and she couldn't put a name to the feeling. It was as though the torch had been snuffed of its fire, and the dark had returned from the shadows.

"Dragons fly in the east," the king said. He took the torch from her hand and held it high over his head. With his other hand, he took hers and led her farther into the chamber.

The Kingsguard waited by the door.

"They don't fly here," Shireen said.

They inspected each skull... from the very large, to the very small. _Dead things._ She tried to name each one as she'd read in the books, but couldn't marry the blackened, charred bones with the glorious creatures drawn on the page.

"They did once," the king answered her. "They brought fire when the winter winds came and almost froze the realm." 

Her hand tightened around the king's fingers. His hand was rough and stiff, too large that  her fingers barely met even as she held him tightly.

"Why do we keep them here, grand-uncle?" she asked him. "The dead are buried, aren't they? We should bury them and let them rest."

"They weren't always here," the king told her. "The Targaryen kings had them in the great hall, as a reminder of the power they once wielded. When my brother Robert took the throne, he had them brought down here. He detested dragons."

"Did you love them?"

The king snorted. It was a funny sound she rarely heard from him. She smiled to herself, amused by it. "I did not love them, but there is power in dragons. I've seen it with mine own eyes."

Shireen frowned at him. "So you _loved_ dragons, then?"

The king shook his head. "You can grow to hate things that you love, child, as much as you can come to respect things that you mislike."

"Then you... _mislike_ dragons?"

The king smiled. Shireen barely saw it but it was there. He didn't seem so terrifying when he smiled but he did it so seldom that Shireen always forgot what he looked like without his usual severity.

"I _respect_ dragons. Before the dragons had come again, I had dreamed of them as they were writ in books, drawn on the pages by others long dead before my time. It had been a hundred years since a dragon was hatched again. No man living saw them for what they truly were."

"Not until the Long Night," she added, remembering that from her lessons.

The king nodded, approving of her astuteness. "Very good. You know your history."

Shireen beamed with pride. The king was not generous with his praise.

A sudden quiet fell over them. The torch shifted once again as the king lowered the fire as though hiss arm had grown tired. Shireen looked up at him to realize that he looked at her oddly, almost sadly.

Shireen frowned. "Grand-uncle?"

Hearing the alarm in her voice, the Kingsguard stirred from where they stood. "Your Grace?" called Ser Rolland.

The king glanced at them dismissively and they stilled.

"My own knights take me for a dying man. I won't die for a while yet," he told them.

Shireen misliked hearing talk of death, especially when she was surrounded by it, armed only with a torch that kept the darkness at bay.

Sensing her unease, the king tightened his hand around hers. "Not for a long while," he said again, softly this time, and only for her ears. The king _didn't lie._ "I mean to to see the end of this winter. It's gone on for too long," he sighed. "If the Long Night truly is the stuff of history and not of legend, then this must be ours."

Shireen mustered a smile, though a sudden fear seized her. The dragons had not been seen for a while and many thought that their presence meant that the Night wore on, longer and longer, until farmers knew not to expect fruit from the barren earth.

She'd sat in the throne room with Stannis once, taking her place among the small council. A commander of the Night's Watch had come to King's Landing to seek audience with the king. When he was asked how many swords he needed that year to feed the Wall, the commander grinned. _None_ , he'd said, and Shireen didn't know what it meant. Stannis didn't either, but the king did.

He'd looked at his small council with something like surprise on his face. When his eyes drifted to Stannis and Shireen, an odd look passed over them. Shireen didn't understand it then. _That's good, isn't it?_ she'd asked Stannis. _That the Wall doesn't need swords anymore._ Her brother only shrugged. The moment ended before Shireen could mull it over and hadn't thought of it again until now.

In a brief flash of bravery, she dared to burrow closer to the king's side, leaning against him.

"I think I shall miss you when you're gone," Shireen said, matter-of-factly. "I'd hate to miss you, so you mustn't ever leave."

The king let out a laugh. It sounded like the snap of old wood."Even when I terrify you, child?"

Shireen grimaced. "You don't terrify me, grand-uncle."

"You must not lie," the king told her. "You will find many hard truths in your long life and all of them will scare you into silence or, worse than silence, _falsehood,_ and that is the darkest road of all. You will lose yourself," his voice softened. "And never find your way again."

Shireen took his words to heart, nodding. Her hair scratched at his robe but she didn't mind. "You _do_ terrify me, then. Sometimes," she said. "I'm not scared of you _now,_ though. But I was little scared earlier. Alright, I was scared _a lot_."

"And why were you scared?" the king asked her. Shireen bit back a sigh. She _knew_ that tone. It meant that a long lesson was going to unspool, with Shireen's guilt wound at the end of it.

Shireen rehearsed the answer Grand Maester Pylos had always expected from her. "Because I was doing something I wasn't supposed to. I _know_ , grand-uncle."

"Then where's the wisdom in repeating deeds with terrible consequences?" the king asked again.

Shireen looked up at him as though the answer was the most obvious thing in the world. "Father always said that if I wanted something I needed to work for it. So I _worked_ for it."

The king huffed in bemusement. "Of all the values to inherit from your father, you choose his bull-headedness."

"Stags are bull-headed, aren't they?" Shireen said with pride. "And I'm a Baratheon, aren't I?"

The king sighed. "That you are. Both bull-headed and a Baratheon, and your father's daughter."

"And your grand-niece," Shireen said, smiling.

The king chuckled under his breath, a deep rumble like the threat of rain. "When Edric named you after Shireen, I didn't expect you to grow so willful," he said, his voice softening.

Of her namesake, Shireen only knew as much as Edric and Lord Davos cared to tell her. Even the queen spoke so infrequently of the daughter she'd lost. A portrait of her, the princess Shireen, hung by the doors of Maegor's Holdfast. Shireen passed it often, when she left her chambers in the morning and returned to it at night.

Shireen often wondered why she was named after the princess. They didn't look much alike. She was prettier, for one, or so she liked to think. She inherited her father's look, the Baratheon black of his hair, and the blue of his eyes. She smiled like her mother, Lord Davos often said, and laughed as easily as she did. The princess Shireen, on the other hand, had been a quiet child, marred with greyscale and almost reclusive because of it.

She loved to read, Lord Davos had said, speaking of the child he knew from her birth to her death. But of the three children it was Stannis that loved books the most, not Shireen. Not _this_ Shireen, at least.

"Did she not like adventures, grand-uncle?" Shireen asked.

The king was quiet for a moment, digging deep for memories that had withered away through time. "She must have," he said at last, with the uncertainty of someone who hadn't witnessed it firsthand, yet with the surety of a father who liked to think he knew the manner of his daughter. "She read about them, that much I know. She often dreamed of dragons," he said, his voice growing heavy. "But they were not happy dreams."

"My dreams of dragons are often happy," Shireen said, frowning in confusion. "They're exciting creatures, aren't they? Last night I dreamt that I flew high above the Eyrie and went as far as the North where Lord Stark's direwolf chased after... Grand-uncle?"

The king had grown quiet, distracted. Shireen didn't like it when people didn't listen to her stories.

She jostled the hand in hers, trying to win back his attention.

Slowly, as though mired in mud, the king looked at her. "Come," he said gruffly. "It's time you went to bed."

Shireen sighed but obeyed the king as he steered her towards the door, her hand still in his, and led her out.

"The dragons don't get lonely in here do they, grand-uncle?" she asked, casting one last look over her shoulder. The light went with them and she saw only shadows.

"They're things, Shireen. Things don't get lonely. And they must always be here," the king said, handing the torch to Ser Richard as they passed the Kingsguard. "To remind us of our duty."

Behind them, Ser Rolland shouldered the door closed with a creaking thud.

"Our duty to... death?" Shireen asked as they walked down the hall.

The king laughed his non-laugh again. Shireen found that she liked the sound, as unusual as it was.

"Our duty to the dragons that fly in the east," the king said. "The stag sits the Iron Throne but it had not been built for us. You would do well to remember that, Shireen. The Red Keep has many secrets, most of them terrible. Dragons rest within these walls and here they will remain until the end of our days."

 

* * *

 

 

**end**

**Author's Note:**

> Unlike the other fics I've worked on, I've actually finished this multi-chaptered monster before I started posting it so I''ll be updating every couple of days or so.
> 
> Thank you thank you thank you [xylodemon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/xylodemon/pseuds/xylodemon) for the patient beta work. All mistakes still found herein are mine. 
> 
> This fic is for the squad. You know who you are. :**
> 
> Fan theories used:  
> 
> 
> * Valonqar Prophecy; Jaime kills Cersei after the deaths of their children, etc.  
> 
> * [Patchface burns Shireen for the Drowned God](http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/1gxlr0/)  
> 
> * Jon is the son of Ned Stark and Ashara Dayne, not R + L; Jon gets resurrected by Melisandre.  
> 
> * Daenerys returns to Essos (and re-establishes a new empire ala Old Valyria).  
> 
> * [Young Griff is a Blackfyre Pretender](http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/156odh/spoilers_all_complete_analysis_of_the_blackfyre/)  
> 
> * Got the idea of Stannis possibly taking the black at some point from linndechir, like, _ages_ ago and neither of us could remember where exactly it was. So I'm not sure if I really got it from her or if I dreamt it but in any case, the disclaimer stands that I didn't come up with the idea on my own.
>   
> 
> * **eta:** The Long Night as the Dark Ages.


End file.
